From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Jul 4 12:12:57 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 91DF837B400 for ; Thu, 4 Jul 2002 12:12:52 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mice.XGforce.COM (adsl-63-203-118-74.dsl.lsan03.pacbell.net [63.203.118.74]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C293843E3B for ; Thu, 4 Jul 2002 12:12:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mattl3@earthlink.net) Received: from ssn (brams.XGforce.COM [63.203.118.78]) by mice.XGforce.COM (8.11.6/8.11.6) with SMTP id g64JC1w08681; Thu, 4 Jul 2002 12:12:01 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mattl3@earthlink.net) Message-ID: <004701c2238e$afcf45c0$4e76cb3f@ssn> From: "Matt" To: "Michael Scheidell" , "Peter Wemm" Cc: References: <20020704182346.02A1F390F@overcee.wemm.org> Subject: Re: Best way to install on Dozens of boxes? Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2002 12:12:00 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 Disposition-Notification-To: "Matt" X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG You can also use CFS software from www.xgforce.com to help for package installations to many fbsds. It's a good replication software for fbsd. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Wemm" To: "Michael Scheidell" Cc: Sent: Thursday, July 04, 2002 11:23 AM Subject: Re: Best way to install on Dozens of boxes? > "Michael Scheidell" wrote: > > If I want to install FBSD 4.5 on dozens of identical boxes, what is the best > > way? > > > > I don't want to take the disks out and dup/mirror them, not dozens of them. > > > > The hardware supports pxe and I had half a hope that I could set up a master > > system with bootpd, let each target system boot by itself and load its own > > image. > > > > This would be to a 'virgin' hd, with no slice or partitions yet. > > > > What about a master boot cd rom? > > What about setting up and alternate ftp source and 'release' image? one that > > we managed and controlled? > > > At yahoo, we do this by the thousand. We netboot using PXE, and have about > a 30MB 'mfsroot' image that is preloaded by the netboot loader. The system > boots up to a fairly full functional mini-freebsd. > > Then, from NFS, we run a script ("clone" - we used to do this disk-to-disk) > that partitions and installs a set of cpio.gz images from the NFS server. > We just tell the clone script what hostname we want (it looks it up in DNS) > and what drive to install on (we have a lot of hardware variation) and any > tweaks to partition sizes. > > We did write our own tool to do the partitioning and bootblock installs. > scripting fdisk/disklabel/etc is too painful - especially when some of our > installs need to preserve a server 'system partition' (ugh). > > The netboot takes less than a minute, the install takes 2-3 minutes at the > most. After the network install is done, power off (netbooted remember) and > turn off netboot and we're away. > > We also find this environment invalueable for repairing damaged systems. > Simply netboot the machine in the rack (we have the netboot environment > available just about everywhere) and we have a fairly functional system > running from ramdisk that we can use to work on a corrupted OS. > > We haven't used sysinstall at yahoo for years - except for a small number > of isolated incidents. Our needs are probably different to yours though, > because we need to do this continually and the time investment to build > the system has well and truely paid off. If you only have a small number > to do, a custom sysinstall is probably more suitable. I believe Alfred's > PXE pages describe this. You may like to burn a CD-RW or something for > it if that works for you. > > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/pxe/ > > Cheers, > -Peter > -- > Peter Wemm - peter@wemm.org; peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com > "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5 > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message