From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Oct 19 10:21:31 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from resnet.uoregon.edu (resnet.uoregon.edu [128.223.122.47]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5628337B4CF for ; Thu, 19 Oct 2000 10:21:29 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (dwhite@localhost) by resnet.uoregon.edu (8.10.1/8.10.1) with ESMTP id e9JHLE524515; Thu, 19 Oct 2000 10:21:18 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 10:21:14 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug White To: Danny Howard Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: mfsroot over nfs and optional install.cfg ?? In-Reply-To: <20001016172832.E97579@never.tellme.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Danny Howard wrote: > I'm working on doing a FreeBSD jumpstat process based on > http://people.freebsd.org/~alfred/pxe/ If you're at BSDCon please to my talk on it tomorrow. :-) > My primary limitation is configurability - I need to be able to run sysinstall > with a different install.cfg per install. So the first answer to that is > "configure each client with a different PXE root and go from there." I'm curious what differences you need. If it's radical or can't be handled in post-install then you would be better off writing your own installer. > Then I get the irritation that I must diddle with an mfsroot image to change > the install.cfg. I've been poring over what loader documentation I can find, > but still haven't even figured out how the "let's go to mfsroot which will > take us to sysinstall in the next stage" thing works ... there's nothing in > mfsroot's /etc, for example ... It isn't needed for the most part -- sysinstall runs as init in the install environment so there's no /etc/rc* to run. > >From loader.rc: > load -t mfs_root /mfsroot > [...] > set vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/md0c" > boot > > How is boot different from autoboot? Autoboot is a variable; 'boot' does a countdown from 'autoboot' seconds. > Can I get around having to load the mfs_root image and just dump it in > the pxe boot directory? I'm getting a hunch that maybe I can do an > NFS partition and set vfs.root.mountfrom to use NFS ... You're shooting for an NFS-mounted root I bet, and I believe we have it going on the lab machines here at the con. I'll have to pick them apart and see what they do. > Then, the other question is, how the heck does sysinstall get launched? If I > can get at a script that launches sysinstall, I could set an install.cfg for > sysinstall to run instead of having to point at differnt install.cfg's via > dhcpd.conf ... You're in the 'hack sysinstall' arena. You can recompile it to use a different path for the install.cfg. Doug White | FreeBSD: The Power to Serve dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | www.FreeBSD.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message