Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 03:10:57 +0000 From: Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk> To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD remote install Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.1.20031228030024.02d59dd8@popserver.sfu.ca>
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As you are all aware, many computer systems around the world are possessed by evil penguins. It would be nice to exorcize these evil spirits, but this can be difficult if we don't have physical access to the machines in question. I've put together some code for remotely installing FreeBSD over existing i386 Linux systems. In short, I use NetBSD's makefs tool to build a FreeBSD disk image which boots entirely into memory, sets up the network, and sets a root password. Providing that the beginning of the machine's drive is quiescent (ie, if the first partition is swap, and you've disabled swapping), you can write this image to disk with dd, reboot, and ssh into FreeBSD. Once you've got a complete FreeBSD filesystem running in memory, you can slice and partition your drives and install FreeBSD however you like; this has the added side effect of making vinum installations much easier. For the code and more details, see http://www.daemonology.net/depenguinator/ Colin Percival
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