Machine Replication

Danny Howard dannyman at toldme.com
Thu Jul 21 22:11:09 GMT 2005


On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 03:04:01PM -0500, Dan Mack wrote:
> <snip>
> 
> Is there a jumpstart (solaris), kickstart (redhat linux), roboinst (irix),
> or ignite (hpux) like auto-installer for BSD?

No.  g4u and a script might do a good job for you if your hardware is
mostly similar.

> If there was, then I wouldn't image the disk at all, I'd instead setup up 
> custom network images that I could blast to any system just by pxebooting 
> it.  I'm not sure if it is possible with FreeBSD though, anyone?

It is possible.  I have done it before.  I had some of those funky VA
Linux machines which need the dongle boxes to support video and keyboard.
I had them booting from hard drive or DHCP, and if I wanted to re-image
a machine I just had to clobber the MBR and reboot. :)

Setting up the disk partition with sysinstall was the biggest bitch.

If I were to set up a system like this again, I might do something with
g4u to set out the basic systems, with an rc script that can pull a
post-install recipe which does things like growfs /usr/local, and do
machine-specific customization.  Then PUBLISH your work before you get
laid off.  (That is how my last efforts were concluded.)

Cheers,
-danny

-- 
http://dannyman.toldme.com/


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