ZFS on root, serial console install

[Matt Reimer]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 10:27 PM, Charles Sprickman <spork at bway.net> wrote:

> Any hints on that one?
>
> I finally got around to getting dhcp/tftp/nfs setup on an internal network
> to perform normal installs (and with some pxelinux hackery, the ability to
> boot a DOS disk or memtest86 disk images).
>
> Sysinstall in general is kind of an unweildy beast over serial, but one
> thing I was not able to accomplish was to get a shell (no extra virtual
> consoles on serial) or attempt any mounting of fixit media.  From my last
> install that put ZFS on root, I had to do quite a bit of tapdancing since I
> had no DVD or bootable USB media - lots of switching from the install disk
> to fixit, which brought me to many chicken and egg moments.  I did it
> though...
>
> But remotely, I'm not seeing a good way to do this.  If mfsroot were larger
> and had more tools, then I'd be in business.  This is probably the direction
> I need to get shoved in.
>
> I've looked at some other options with pxelinux and perhaps booting the
> mini ISO, but I'm not sure that gets me anywhere.
>
> Any tips?  This isn't a make or break situation, I live 15 minutes from the
> colo...  It's more of a quest. :)


The way I do it is to boot over the network using pxeboot, configure the
partitions and ZFS pool and filesystems mounted on /mnt, then install using
sysinstall, using the Options dialog to set the install directory to /mnt. I
think I created the NFS filesystem using "make installworld
DESTDIR=/usr/nfs/freebsd" or something like that; this gives you all the
tools you need.

Matt