Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 06:58:44 +0200 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: Warren Guy <warren.guy@calorieking.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Developing and maintaining a rapidly deployable image of an installed system Message-ID: <20090507065844.d0e90f56.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <4A025F42.50308@calorieking.com> References: <4A025F42.50308@calorieking.com>
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On Thu, 07 May 2009 12:10:42 +0800, Warren Guy <warren.guy@calorieking.com> wrote: > I'm just wondering if there is an established best practice for > developing and maintaining a rapidly deployable image of an installed > FreeBSD system? One of the common (at least I think so) methods is using the system's standard tools dump and restore. You create the installation as you need it on a separate machine or in a jailed environment, and you end up with partitions as you want them to have on the machines for deployment. Then you dump these partitions into files. On the (fresh) machines, you boot into a minimal FreeBSD system that allows you to read the dump files, from optical media, tape, or across the network. First you slice, partition and newfs the partitions (can easily be scripted if you know what you want), then you restore the partitions (as on the machine used for preparing them) from the dump files. That's for deploying. For maintaining... it's possible to use a similar method where you only need to dump and restore partitions where you did major changes. For minor ones it should be sufficient to alter files "the usual way" (can be scripted, too). > If anyone can point me towards documentation or any other resources that > might be of use I would greatly appreciate it. There has been a discussion thread some days ago on this list which covers a bit of this topic (deploying). -- Polytropon >From Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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