Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2011 15:13:45 -0600 From: Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org> To: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org, freebsd-sysinstall@freebsd.org, grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> Subject: Re: FreeBSD Installer Roadmap Message-ID: <4D642709.6080604@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <201102221214.58073.jhb@freebsd.org> References: <AANLkTi=VM1qGLrvjDJnhafi5=B4DCmL85CKmyOF7t9Sp@mail.gmail.com> <201102220745.45695.jhb@freebsd.org> <4D63E3B9.8030308@freebsd.org> <201102221214.58073.jhb@freebsd.org>
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On 02/22/11 11:14, John Baldwin wrote: > On Tuesday, February 22, 2011 11:26:33 am Nathan Whitehorn wrote: >> On 02/22/11 06:45, John Baldwin wrote: >>> On Saturday, February 19, 2011 4:34:11 am grarpamp wrote: >>>> Sysinstall is fine, as I'm sure any replacement will be. So I'll >>>> just note a few things I'd like to see in any such replacement... >>>> >>>> 1 - I used install.cfg's on floppies to clone systems, a lot. Hands >>>> on the box were needed with that. Operators skills were in question, >>>> so having them use the dialog menus properly was a pain and often >>>> resulted in non-zeroed disk or half built systems. And though all >>>> else was cloned, it needed a separate<host>.cfg for each box due >>>> to: >>>> >>>> fqdn, gateway, ip/mask >>>> interface - sometimes changed >>>> root disk - sometimes changed >>>> >>>> Would have killed for a simple console shell script to ask those >>>> questions of the operator, per machine. >>> >>> Actually, you can do that if you are a bit creative (add a few more tools to >>> the mfsroot, and use the 'system' command in install.cfg to invoke a shell >>> script that then generates a foo.cfg you later include via loadConfig, but >>> I've covered that at multiple conferences by now). That said, I'm hopeful >>> that the new installer will be more flexible in less hackish ways while >>> letting you do things like PXE boot to a shell where you can use mfiutil to >>> create a RAID-5 volume and then invoke the installer on that, etc. >> >> This is something that I very explicitly built in to the design of >> bsdinstall. When the installer starts (as well as at several other >> points), you are offered an option to bring up a shell specifically to >> do things like this. Scripted installs are just shell scripts instead of >> a configuration file, so it is trivial to interleave complicated things >> like this. > > Yes, I should have worded it a bit differently in that I do actually think > that is true from what little I have seen and the "hopeful" bit more refers > to my being able to adopt it locally. > Ah, understood. Speaking of which, there is a new amd64 snapshot ISO with bsdinstall on it (an i386 ISO should follow in the next day or so): http://people.freebsd.org/~nwhitehorn/bsdinstall-amd64-20110222.iso.bz2 This is more or less the planned final form of the installer and layout of the install media, so I would very much appreciate testing at this point. Pending a small patch to the distributeworld target currently under review, this will be followed by patches to the release Makefile to change the default installer to bsdinstall in -CURRENT. Barring any objections, I hope to have that second patch in the tree by mid-March. -Nathan
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