Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 11:46:39 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time) From: Anshuman Kanwar <anshuman@expertcity.com> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: jumpstart for freebsd. Message-ID: <Pine.WNT.4.44.0303131141530.2964-100000@KANWAR2K> In-Reply-To: <1B9E0D7C-5589-11D7-B1F6-000393BB9222@queasyweasel.com>
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Greetings, I've spent most of last year automating the installation of FreeBSD systems at my workplace. I regularly have to install/upgrade FreeBSD at remote datacenters on multiple machines. We've been using 4.2 through 4.6.2 and plan to move to 4.8 as soon as it is out. Doing the 'install/customizing the kernel/slapping on config files'routine was taking too much overhead through all these upgrades. Having worked with Solaris, I really appreciated the ease it offered to SysAdmins like me with its setup_install_server and add_install_client scripts. As a result of all the above, I wrote a set of perl scripts that do a very similar job for FreeBSD. The idea is: 1) make it easy to deploy large numbers of FreeBSD in various physical locations 2) post-install configuration should be zero or minimum 3) each machine and each location can have a set of properties, these should be correctly installed. (e.g. unique IP address for each machine, custom ntp.conf for each location...) 4) maintain the identity (and maybe some data) of a machine across upgrades (e.g. same network config before and after OS upgrade, even though the disk has just been wiped) 5) be able to add custom packages/extend functionality to the install system (e.g. custom kernel, funky login banner) 6) and most importantly...make machine downtime for upgrade as close to the time required for copying the OS as possible :) My scripts are just wrappers around DHCP/TFTP/NFS/pxeboot/sysinstall script bits, that are already present and well documented. If there is any interest in this work, I will be more than happy to see it become one of the ways of installing FreeBSD. Of course, some modifications would be required to make these scripts more generic, robust and user friendly. The questions I have are: 1) Is this duplication of any prev. work ? 2) If no then how should I go about trying to integrate the code into FreeBSD? Thanks for your time, Ansh Kanwar. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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