Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 14:12:18 -0700 From: Colin Percival <cperciva@freebsd.org> To: Matthew Fleming <mdf@FreeBSD.org> Cc: FreeBSD current <freebsd-current@freebsd.org>, freebsd-rc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: RFC: support for "first boot" rc.d scripts Message-ID: <525DAFB2.7090105@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <CAMBSHm-YqxeVsjVXszh-4gt-doXZQVL%2BXKpx_65az8TrE_V0ow@mail.gmail.com> References: <525B258F.3030403@freebsd.org> <CAMBSHm-YqxeVsjVXszh-4gt-doXZQVL%2BXKpx_65az8TrE_V0ow@mail.gmail.com>
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On 10/15/13 13:09, Matthew Fleming wrote: > We use something like this at work. However, our version creates a file after > the firstboot scripts have run, and doesn't run if the file exists. > > Is there a reason to prefer one choice over the other? Naively I'd expect it to > be better to run when the file doesn't exist, creating when done; it solves the > problem of making sure the magic file exists before first boot, for the other > polarity. I don't see that making sure that the magic file exists is a problem, since you'd also need to make sure you have knobs turned on in /etc/rc.conf and/or extra rc.d scripts installed. In a very marginal sense, deleting a file is safer than creating one, since if the filesystem is full you can delete but not create. It also seems to me that the sensible polarity is that having something extra lying around makes extra things happen rather than inhibiting them. But probably the best argument has to do with upgrading systems -- if you update a 9.2-RELEASE system to 10.1-RELEASE and there's a "first boot" script in that new release, you don't want to have it accidentally get run simply because you failed to create a /firstboot file during the upgrade process. -- Colin Percival Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid
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