sysinstall as a post-install tool

[Garrett Cooper]

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 6:57 PM, Eitan Adler <lists at eitanadler.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 9:50 PM, Ron McDowell <rcm at fuzzwad.org> wrote:
>> I [Ron] just added myself to the sysinstall list.
>
> Good
>>
>> What I envision is a text based system administration suite that will
>> [hopefully] do everything that the "Configure" option on the top level of
>> the sysinstall menu does.  I see it as being part of the base OS, such that
>> once one has rebooted from HD after the install and logged in as root [or
>> user+su], a menu can be brought up by entering "sysadmin" or such.  Does
>> "sysadmin" work for a name?  I kinda like it.
>
> Do you plan on this tool being run "late in the game" after the system
> has been used for a while or this is a "welcome new user" only tool?
>
>> I plan on basically going through the sysinstall post-configuration menu:
>
> [snip configure menu]
>
> Do you plan on making this a C based program or a shell script?
>
>> and as close as reasonable, stick to the same task flow.  I plan on writing
>> it against 10-current and look at back-porting to 9 after it's somewhat
>> stable.
>
> I'd like to work with you on this, especially w.r.t to ensuring that
> it meets the requirements for entering the base system.
>
>> One new, important, and not-so-difficult task will be: on exiting, check the
>> sanity of /etc/rc.conf and complain if needed, but allow the user to
>> override the safety-switch if foot-shooting is really requested.  :)  I'm a
>> firm believer of not disallowing anything.
>
> Good on both counts.

    Please note that there's already existing infrastructure in
FreeBSD that partitions UFS and ZFS: pc-sysinstall. This doesn't need
to be [re]written... It needs polishing, maybe some work with
non-Intel architectures, some documentation, and integration into a
complete tool (and I will be the first to help out with this because I
have the ear of several members who help maintain pc-sysinstall). In
this case, all that really needs to be done is guide things with an
ncurses frontend. That can be written in Unix shell with dialog to
avoid bitrot that occurred with sysinstall when the underlying
partitioning tools and defacto method of doing things in C
dramatically changed (libdisk -> libgeom).
    It already works reasonably well for PC-BSD and is used by other
projects such as FreeNAS.
Thanks,
-Garrett