From owner-freebsd-current Fri Mar 17 4:53:20 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from forrie.net (forrie.net [216.67.12.69]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A875137BB0A for ; Fri, 17 Mar 2000 04:53:12 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from forrie@forrie.com) Received: from Forrest (getbent@forrie.ne.mediaone.net [24.147.129.124]) by forrie.net with id e2HCrBj00863 for ; Fri, 17 Mar 2000 07:53:11 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <4.3.1.2.20000317074445.00b60d90@216.67.12.69> X-Sender: forrie@216.67.12.69 X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3.1 Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 07:51:28 -0500 To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org From: Forrest Aldrich Subject: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG There was mentioned that someone was "appointed" (perhaps unwillingly :) to look into this one... who? I was also curious about what people do to keep a fleet of FreeBSD machines up-to-date with CVSup and buildworld. I can't imagine manually going to more than 100 machines and doing the same thing manually... how time consuming. To summarize again, we are deploying status monitoring machines into POPs, across the US. Those machines are identical in terms of hardware, et al. We were hoping to find a means by which to streamline the installation process, such that we could create (say) custom boot floppies where you'd input minimum information (IP address, hostname, domain, etc.) and it would then go off and perform the installation (from fdisk, newfs... to editing packet filters appropriately, which make require a "template" of sorts). The idea of doing all of this manually makes carpal tunnel syndrome sound like a vacation, compared to what condition one might be in afterward :) Anyone got some ingenious hack to perform this? Someone made a comment about one procedure we were doing which involved using "dd" to mirror a base installation onto another disk. As far as I know, there haven't been any gotchyas with that method. The disks are WD "pluggable" drives. So, we have a master machine that we simply do our mirror from. It's hacky as hell. Someone mentioned that sysinstall could be scripted... is this the way to go, then? TIA... _F To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message