From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Aug 12 03:12:37 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 302E316A41F for ; Fri, 12 Aug 2005 03:12:37 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from maudeuser@yahoo.com) Received: from web31615.mail.mud.yahoo.com (web31615.mail.mud.yahoo.com [68.142.198.161]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id B843F43D48 for ; Fri, 12 Aug 2005 03:12:36 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from maudeuser@yahoo.com) Received: (qmail 38718 invoked by uid 60001); 12 Aug 2005 03:12:36 -0000 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com; h=Message-ID:Received:Date:From:Subject:To:Cc:In-Reply-To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding; b=Oef8bVSqECM9wC3ZeJf74cIa3AWB+SceNfLSb7fvDZ/pzNN5INRpvozwZD1okA5GEYBx9yKfIZVHlXgBf9fILoEwe3GjA/zyLEevPu7cDmihgAeCRIsG3Kq0wdsd7zuyAamdlKcc1aBqcS6hn79i8S7GAfVx1x1OBu6+khlSm1c= ; Message-ID: <20050812031236.38716.qmail@web31615.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Received: from [24.184.107.52] by web31615.mail.mud.yahoo.com via HTTP; Thu, 11 Aug 2005 20:12:36 PDT Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 20:12:36 -0700 (PDT) From: Maude User To: Nikolas Britton In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Content-Filtered-By: Mailman/MimeDel 2.1.5 Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Newbie needs help setting up rackmount server X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 03:12:37 -0000 It never even occurred to me that you could try using a USB flash drive to install from -- that would be a very interesting approach. Not sure how much a USB flash drive would cost, but I got a Panasonic USB2.0/Firewire CD-RW/DVD+/-RW (DVRS706) for $99 at jandr.com, so that should be good to boot from and will come in handy later for other things, and I can always have a boot CD as a backup. - Steve in Brooklyn Nikolas Britton wrote: On 8/11/05, Maude User wrote: > I didn't realize it would be slow using a null-cable modem - thanks for that info. > > I guess I should borrow a monitor and keyboard to do the install faster. > > I'm personally liking the usb flash drive thingy idea I mentioned earlier if you have no floppy or cd-rom drives. Not sure if this will even work btw, never tried it. What you would do is download the the 20MB bootonly.iso CD-ROM image and mound it (this step my not be needed) with mdconfig: "mdconfig -a -t vnode -f 5.4-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso -u 0" Use "mount_cd9660 /dev/md0 /mnt" and you can change the config files on the fake cd for console redirection to serial port, 'echo "/boot/loader -h" > boot.config', etc. Next you would dd the image onto the usb flash drive: "dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/da0 bs=1M" Now remove the usb flash drive from your laptop and plug it into the server, tell the server to boot from the usb flash drive, the filesystem on the flash drive would be cd9660 and hopefully boot like a normal CD-ROM. If your flash drive was big enough you could load the entier disc1.iso cd onto it, what happened to the miniinst.iso that was only 270MB? I guess you could strip all the packages off the disc1.iso to make a miniinst.iso disk? What do you guys think, would this method work? the only hang up's I can think of is making your usb flash drive think it's a CD-ROM and if the FreeBSD install discs will work when it thinks its a hard drive, da0 for usb storage.... I'll have to try it tomarrow.... __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com