Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
Daniel C. Sobral wrote: Brian Dean wrote: Forrest Aldrich wrote: Someone mentioned that sysinstall could be scripted... is this the way to go, then? I use scripted sysinstalls here. It's really easy, however, you still have to interact with a few dialogs, namely: 1) of course, you have to specify your config file from the "Load Config" main menu option Huh? AFAIK, sysinstall accept script commands from the command line, so this could be skipped. I was referring to the use of sysinstall for the initial installation of the OS. I don't see how you can do what you say unless you create a custom boot floppy (or CD) for _each_ machine you want to install. And since we are talking on the order of 100 machines here, I don't think that is practical. Perhaps you could get by with one boot image if your machines were configured via DHCP (mine are not, and in my case, it is not practical to do so, at least not right now). And just so I'm not misinterpretted, I'm not complaining about having to specify the config file. It's not that big of a deal. In fact, I think Jordan has made it just about as simple as it can reasonably get. I was just pointing out that it's not _entirely_ hands off, and merely listed that interaction with sysinstall for the sake of completeness. For the remaining four, we can probably code appropriately via the scripting mechanism to avoid the prompts: 1) dhcp yes/no 2) crypto yes/no/which ones 3) ports yes/no 4) are you sure you want to really do this? yes/no -Brian To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
It does not have to be that hands on. Brian Dean wrote: Daniel C. Sobral wrote: Brian Dean wrote: Forrest Aldrich wrote: Someone mentioned that sysinstall could be scripted... is this the way to go, then? I use scripted sysinstalls here. It's really easy, however, you still have to interact with a few dialogs, namely: 1) of course, you have to specify your config file from the "Load Config" main menu option Huh? AFAIK, sysinstall accept script commands from the command line, so this could be skipped. I was referring to the use of sysinstall for the initial installation of the OS. I don't see how you can do what you say unless you create a custom boot floppy (or CD) for _each_ machine you want to install. And since we are talking on the order of 100 machines here, I don't think that is practical. Perhaps you could get by with one boot image if your machines were configured via DHCP (mine are not, and in my case, it is not practical to do so, at least not right now). And just so I'm not misinterpretted, I'm not complaining about having to specify the config file. It's not that big of a deal. In fact, I think Jordan has made it just about as simple as it can reasonably get. I was just pointing out that it's not _entirely_ hands off, and merely listed that interaction with sysinstall for the sake of completeness. For the remaining four, we can probably code appropriately via the scripting mechanism to avoid the prompts: 1) dhcp yes/no If the sysinstall script has all the host info you don't need to answer this. 2) crypto yes/no/which ones What I did is make a package of ssh it no longer asks. 3) ports yes/no Can be specified in the sysinstall script. 4) are you sure you want to really do this? yes/no I still answer this one. -Brian I hacked PicoBSD to do this so it works from one floppy. You can either name the file install.cfg in which case it is run automatically or give it a ../stand/my_script.cfg to grab the build file you wish from stand which is where I put my scripts on the build floppy. I have about a dozen different scripts on the floppy and still seem to have lots of room. I haven't automated adding users. I did this under 3.2 and am trying to find the time to move it to 3.4 although it should be able to build 3.4 servers with no problem. Pete To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
There was mentioned that someone was "appointed" (perhaps unwillingly :) to look into this one... who? I was also curious about what people do to keep a fleet of FreeBSD machines up-to-date with CVSup and buildworld. I can't imagine manually going to more than 100 machines and doing the same thing manually... how time consuming. To summarize again, we are deploying status monitoring machines into POPs, across the US. Those machines are identical in terms of hardware, et al. We were hoping to find a means by which to streamline the installation process, such that we could create (say) custom boot floppies where you'd input minimum information (IP address, hostname, domain, etc.) and it would then go off and perform the installation (from fdisk, newfs... to editing packet filters appropriately, which make require a "template" of sorts). The idea of doing all of this manually makes carpal tunnel syndrome sound like a vacation, compared to what condition one might be in afterward :) Anyone got some ingenious hack to perform this? Someone made a comment about one procedure we were doing which involved using "dd" to mirror a base installation onto another disk. As far as I know, there haven't been any gotchyas with that method. The disks are WD "pluggable" drives. So, we have a master machine that we simply do our mirror from. It's hacky as hell. Someone mentioned that sysinstall could be scripted... is this the way to go, then? TIA... _F To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
On Fri, Mar 17, 2000 at 07:51:28AM -0500, Forrest Aldrich wrote: Someone mentioned that sysinstall could be scripted... is this the way to go, then? It's one way to go, although it's not as good as Solaris' JumpStart (although that has faults of it's own...). For a quick example look in /usr/src/release/sysinstall/install.cfg. There's a manual page in the same directory describing how it works (roughly). As far as I can tell from the documentation (I've never actually needed to do an automated FreeBSD install yet), you boot the usual kern mfsroot floppies, then select "load config file", at which point you insert the floppy with install.cfg on it. You'll probably need a bit of time to get it working, but it's a start. -- Dom Mitchell -- Palmer Harvey McLane -- Unix Systems Administrator MCSE -- Minesweeper Consultant Solitaire Expert To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
Forrest Aldrich wrote: Someone mentioned that sysinstall could be scripted... is this the way to go, then? I use scripted sysinstalls here. It's really easy, however, you still have to interact with a few dialogs, namely: 1) of course, you have to specify your config file from the "Load Config" main menu option 2) you need to say whether or not you want to use DHCP 3) you need to interact with the crypto questions 4) you need to say whether or not you want to install the ports I think it would be worthwhile to modify sysinstall to so that you only have to do #1 above, but I haven't found it so painful to interact with the remaining three to submit patches to Jordan yet. Eventually, I will probably do this, unless someone else beats me to it. Everything else can be automated. Here's a sample config file that I put together: # scratchy.cfg # # FreeBSD Installation Config file for scratchy.unx.sas.com # # This file generated on 03/17/00 09:36:00 # debug=yes ipaddr=10.26.1.74 hostname=scratchy.unx.sas.com domainname=unx.sas.com defaultrouter=10.26.0.1 netmask=255.255.0.0 # - End of generated information - netDev=fxp0 ftp=ftp://freebsd2.unx.sas.com/pub/FreeBSD _ftpPath=ftp://freebsd2.unx.sas.com/pub/FreeBSD nameserver=10.16.149.6 mediaSetFTP distSetEverything dists=local X9set distUnsetCustom disk=ad0 partition=exclusive diskPartitionEditor # 128 Meg /root partition ad0s1-1=ufs 262144 / # 256 Meg swap partition ad0s1-2=swap 524288 none # 1 Gig /tmp partition ad0s1-3=ufs 2097152 /tmp # 256 Meg /var partition ad0s1-4=ufs 524288 /var # all remaining space for /usr partition ad0s1-5=ufs 0 /usr diskLabelEditor installCommit # pkg dir = /nfs/freebsd/pub/FreeBSD/packages/All package=bash-2.03 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=elm-2.4ME+68 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=emacs-20.6 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=hexedit-1.1.0 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=less-352 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=linux_base-6.1 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=lsof-4.48 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=mm-1.0.12 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=netscape-communicator-4.72 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=pdksh-5.2.14 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=procmail-3.14 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=rdate-1.0 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=sudo-1.6.2p1 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=tcsh-6.09.00 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=tkcvs-6.0 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=tkdiff-3.04 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=unzip-5.40 noError=TRUE packageAdd package=xv-m17n-3.10a noError=TRUE packageAdd package=zip-2.3 noError=TRUE packageAdd This script uses a local snap machine that we keep current and build snaps nightly from which to do an FTP install. I've got a script that I use to generate these config files. Essentially, I just specify the machine name, and my config generatator figures out the IP address, default router, and netmask, that is required for configuring the ethernet interface. Everything below the line "# - End of generated information -" is the same for all hosts, only the stuff above that line is different for each host. So, I end up with a config file per host. -Brian -- Brian Dean [EMAIL PROTECTED] SAS Institute Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
Yes, making this process easier with Sysinstall would be a Good Thing(tm). Especially I see the need here due to the widespread use of FreeBSD in enterprise environments. This topic will certainly come up again and again. What I would like to see is a customized boot disk that, after loading the kernel etc, goes into a script where you input the critical info (IP, DNS, ... ). It's required to ask the Crypto Questions, I understand -- however, we could "answer" those in the *.cfg file, to avoid the prompts. IMHO, this shouldn't be too difficult to implement. But it would be great to pool in everyone's ideas, so that everyone's needs are considered before commiting such changes. Anyone else have some feedback on this? _F To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
Another issue here, at least in our application of it, is about adding users and setting passwords.With well over 100 machines, we want to also have installed user accounts for our engineers. Again, nightmareish to consider doing manually. Such a script used at startup could contain also the account name and perhaps the "crypted" form of the password, and some other utility would need to do the magic from there. _F To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Forrest Aldrich wrote: Another issue here, at least in our application of it, is about adding users and setting passwords.With well over 100 machines, we want to also have installed user accounts for our engineers. Again, nightmareish to consider doing manually. Such a script used at startup could contain also the account name and perhaps the "crypted" form of the password, and some other utility would need to do the magic from there. Either put on the disk or fetch a copy of the master.passwd, copy it someplace like /root/master.passwd that's on the root partition and do a passwd_mkdb. I would suggest, however, setting up ssh on the first pass and maybe a password on one trusted account that you could install the system(s), go back to you Favorite Terminal(tm), sit down and use a for loop (or other automated method ;) to send (ie. via ssh/scp ;) the master.passwd file to a secure place on the root partition then have ssh execute the remote command 'passwd_mkdb' on the previously sent file and there you have it. j _F To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
As far as keeping them "up to date", this is what we do: - Have a local cvsup-mirror server - All FreeBSD workstations and servers cvsup (just ports) off of it nightly. - Our central build server (which doubles as an insanely overpowered SMP dns server), builds -STABLE, and all kernels nightly When we want to upgrade a machine to current, we just: mount buildbox:/usr/src /usr/src mount buiildbox:/usr/obj /usr/obj cd /usr/src make installworld mergemaster cd /usr/src/sys/compile/mykernel make install reboot This process takes about 15 min on our 100M/s network. We don't do it too often of course, because of the downtime involved, but. As far as keeping the machines "identical", you may want to look into one of the hacks i've seen where in a school lab they boot off a floppy which dd's the hard drives off of an nfs share. I can't remember where I saw this unfortunatly. (not sure if this answers your question, but I hope it odes) - Thomas R. Stromberg Senior Systems Administrator : smtp[[EMAIL PROTECTED]]Research Triangle Commerce, Inc. : http[afterthought.org] pots[1.919.657.1317] : irc[helixblue] FreeBSD Contributor, Perl Hacker : - On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Forrest Aldrich wrote: There was mentioned that someone was "appointed" (perhaps unwillingly :) to look into this one... who? I was also curious about what people do to keep a fleet of FreeBSD machines up-to-date with CVSup and buildworld. I can't imagine manually going to more than 100 machines and doing the same thing manually... how time consuming. To summarize again, we are deploying status monitoring machines into POPs, across the US. Those machines are identical in terms of hardware, et al. We were hoping to find a means by which to streamline the installation process, such that we could create (say) custom boot floppies where you'd input minimum information (IP address, hostname, domain, etc.) and it would then go off and perform the installation (from fdisk, newfs... to editing packet filters appropriately, which make require a "template" of sorts). To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Forrest Aldrich wrote: I was also curious about what people do to keep a fleet of FreeBSD machines up-to-date with CVSup and buildworld. I can't imagine manually going to more than 100 machines and doing the same thing manually... how time consuming. To summarize again, we are deploying status monitoring machines into POPs, across the US. Those machines are identical in terms of hardware, et al. We were hoping to find a means by which to streamline the installation process, such that we could create (say) custom boot floppies where you'd input minimum information (IP address, hostname, domain, etc.) and it would then go off and perform the installation (from fdisk, newfs... to editing packet filters appropriately, which make require a "template" of sorts). If the job they are doing is fairly simple, and they have (or could have) plenty of RAM, have you considered scrapping the disc drives and having a CD-boot system? Although CD drives are not very reliable for heavy-duty use, you should be able to arrange that the working set gets loaded at start-up and the CD is then idle in all normal use - this may "just work" through normal caching, or you may need to copy active files onto an MFS filesystem (you'll need an MFS for various things anyhow). This has the advantage over pico-BSD style installations that you can fill the rest of the CD with a fairly complete FreeBSD installation: in normal use the CD drive is idle, but you have the full set of tools available for use on rare occasions when they are needed. Obviously the machines need to pick up their identities from somewhere, as you want to just duplicate a stack of identical CDs. If the machines can rely on their environment, DHCP is the obvious way to go; if not, one technique I've used is to key it on the MAC address of the ethernet card (in /etc/rc I pick up the MAC address with ifconfig and then have a big case statement to set up the different characteristics of the machines). Obviously this doesn't suit every application, but I have found it highly advantageous when I want to put down a BSD machine in a location with no local BSD skills to fix things if they go wrong. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Forrest Aldrich wrote: I was also curious about what people do to keep a fleet of FreeBSD machines up-to-date with CVSup and buildworld. I can't imagine manually going to more than 100 machines and doing the same thing manually... how time consuming. Have a master cvsup server which runs the cvsupd-bin port and either cvsups manually from an outsider server, or schedules it automatically. Run cron jobs on each of the clients to cvsup from your local server and buildworld (if any changes are picked up). If you don't want to buildworld without testing the process first on a scratch box, then run the cvsup on your cvsupd server manually once you've verified it. To summarize again, we are deploying status monitoring machines into POPs, across the US. Those machines are identical in terms of hardware, et al. We were hoping to find a means by which to streamline the installation process, such that we could create (say) custom boot floppies where you'd input minimum information (IP address, hostname, domain, etc.) and it would then go off and perform the installation (from fdisk, newfs... to editing packet filters appropriately, which make require a "template" of sorts). picobsd might come in handy here. Kris In God we Trust -- all others must submit an X.509 certificate. -- Charles Forsythe [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
* Jonathan Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] [000317 08:48] wrote: On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Forrest Aldrich wrote: Another issue here, at least in our application of it, is about adding users and setting passwords.With well over 100 machines, we want to also have installed user accounts for our engineers. Again, nightmareish to consider doing manually. Such a script used at startup could contain also the account name and perhaps the "crypted" form of the password, and some other utility would need to do the magic from there. Either put on the disk or fetch a copy of the master.passwd, copy it someplace like /root/master.passwd that's on the root partition and do a passwd_mkdb. I would suggest, however, setting up ssh on the first pass and maybe a password on one trusted account that you could install the system(s), go back to you Favorite Terminal(tm), sit down and use a for loop (or other automated method ;) to send (ie. via ssh/scp ;) the master.passwd file to a secure place on the root partition then have ssh execute the remote command 'passwd_mkdb' on the previously sent file and there you have it. You may also want to investigate the package system, i'm pretty sure you can specify that it run particular scripts such as something running 'pw' to add accounts and whatnot. good luck, -Alfred To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
This wouldn't work in our situation, where we are needing to modify data... so if there were a power outage, imagine the hassle. Good idea, though. Most of our systems have 64 - 128mb of ram. They are doing distributed status monitoring and secondary DNS. So, there would be a bit of changes happening from time-to-time. But again, I doubt this would work for us. From the private emails I've received on this topic, it seems that the consenus is to spiff up sysinstall, which is probably the right place to begin with some of this stuff. Not sure who maintains it. _F At 06:56 PM 3/17/00 +, Andrew Gordon wrote: On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Forrest Aldrich wrote: I was also curious about what people do to keep a fleet of FreeBSD machines up-to-date with CVSup and buildworld. I can't imagine manually going to more than 100 machines and doing the same thing manually... how time consuming. To summarize again, we are deploying status monitoring machines into POPs, across the US. Those machines are identical in terms of hardware, et al. We were hoping to find a means by which to streamline the installation process, such that we could create (say) custom boot floppies where you'd input minimum information (IP address, hostname, domain, etc.) and it would then go off and perform the installation (from fdisk, newfs... to editing packet filters appropriately, which make require a "template" of sorts). If the job they are doing is fairly simple, and they have (or could have) plenty of RAM, have you considered scrapping the disc drives and having a CD-boot system? Although CD drives are not very reliable for heavy-duty use, you should be able to arrange that the working set gets loaded at start-up and the CD is then idle in all normal use - this may "just work" through normal caching, or you may need to copy active files onto an MFS filesystem (you'll need an MFS for various things anyhow). This has the advantage over pico-BSD style installations that you can fill the rest of the CD with a fairly complete FreeBSD installation: in normal use the CD drive is idle, but you have the full set of tools available for use on rare occasions when they are needed. Obviously the machines need to pick up their identities from somewhere, as you want to just duplicate a stack of identical CDs. If the machines can rely on their environment, DHCP is the obvious way to go; if not, one technique I've used is to key it on the MAC address of the ethernet card (in /etc/rc I pick up the MAC address with ifconfig and then have a big case statement to set up the different characteristics of the machines). Obviously this doesn't suit every application, but I have found it highly advantageous when I want to put down a BSD machine in a location with no local BSD skills to fix things if they go wrong. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD Installations
Brian Dean wrote: Forrest Aldrich wrote: Someone mentioned that sysinstall could be scripted... is this the way to go, then? I use scripted sysinstalls here. It's really easy, however, you still have to interact with a few dialogs, namely: 1) of course, you have to specify your config file from the "Load Config" main menu option Huh? AFAIK, sysinstall accept script commands from the command line, so this could be skipped. -- Daniel C. Sobral(8-DCS) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Unix to rule them all, One Resolver to find them, One IP to bring them all and in the zone bind them. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD installations across many machines
Nik Clayton wrote: On Fri, Feb 25, 2000 at 10:23:37AM -0500, Forrest Aldrich wrote: I'm wondering if there might not be a way to streamline this install process, such that a boot floopy and script could be created to take a minimum amount of information, and then "do the right thing" as for the install. Things like putting in the packet filters, the kernel, IP config, etc. See sysinstall(8); you can script sysinstall. See src/release/sysinstall/install.cfg I built a pico floppy under 3.2 that uses sysinstall to do most of this. a search of my name in the pico mailing list should turn it up. Pete -- Peter McKenna U S WEST !NTERPRISE [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.interprise.com/ Main 612-664-4000 FAX 612-664-4770 To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD installations across many machines
On Fri, Feb 25, 2000 at 10:23:37AM -0500, Forrest Aldrich wrote: I'm wondering if there might not be a way to streamline this install process, such that a boot floopy and script could be created to take a minimum amount of information, and then "do the right thing" as for the install. Things like putting in the packet filters, the kernel, IP config, etc. See sysinstall(8); you can script sysinstall. See src/release/sysinstall/install.cfg for an example. N -- If you want to imagine the future, imagine a tennis shoe stamping on a penguin's face forever. --- with apologies to George Orwell To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Streamlining FreeBSD installations across many machines
Perhaps this would be of interest in CURRENT issues: We have several servers that we plan on deploying across the US. Their purpose in life is network status and monitoring. The hardware profiles are exactly the same... Currently, we're using DD to mirror a disk image onto a new installation, and them nanually tweaking all the necessary configurations. It's tedious, and is going to get hellish with the amount we plan on deploying. I'm wondering if there might not be a way to streamline this install process, such that a boot floopy and script could be created to take a minimum amount of information, and then "do the right thing" as for the install. Things like putting in the packet filters, the kernel, IP config, etc. Surely someone has done this before...? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD installations across many machines
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Forrest Aldrich writes : Perhaps this would be of interest in CURRENT issues: We have several servers that we plan on deploying across the US. Their purpose in life is network status and monitoring. The hardware profiles are exactly the same... Currently, we're using DD to mirror a disk image onto a new installation, and them nanually tweaking all the necessary configurations. It's tedious, and is going to get hellish with the amount we plan on deploying. There was actually a good deal of interest in this at FreeBSDcon'99, and I belive we managed to bully^H^H^H^H^H^Hpersuade Wes Peters to take an active role in coordinating efforts in this area ? -- Poul-Henning Kamp FreeBSD coreteam member [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Real hackers run -current on their laptop." FreeBSD -- It will take a long time before progress goes too far! To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD installations across many machines
Perhaps this would be of interest in CURRENT issues: We have several servers that we plan on deploying across the US. Their purpose in life is network status and monitoring. The hardware profiles are exactly the same... Currently, we're using DD to mirror a disk image onto a new installation, and them nanually tweaking all the necessary configurations. It's tedious, and is going to get hellish with the amount we plan on deploying. A much faster way to do this is to just dd the first few megabytes of the disk (dd if=foo of=/dev/rXXd bs=32768 count=1024). Then use dump | restore to populate the disk. (We actually have 3.x and 4.x recent build filesystems that are built weekly on a master loading machine just for this purpose.) We mass produce system disk this way and it is much faster than a whole disk image operation especially when dealing with drives much larger than 2G bytes. I'm wondering if there might not be a way to streamline this install process, such that a boot floopy and script could be created to take a minimum amount of information, and then "do the right thing" as for the install. Things like putting in the packet filters, the kernel, IP config, etc. Surely someone has done this before...? We do it on a weekly basis, 4 to 32 disks at a time... Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. Hope this gives you some ideas... -- Rod Grimes - KD7CAX @ CN85sl - (RWG25) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD installations across many machines
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Rodney W. Grimes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A much faster way to do this is to just dd the first few megabytes of the disk (dd if=foo of=/dev/rXXd bs=32768 count=1024). Then use dump | restore to populate the disk. Do you run newfs on the receiving disk before the dump|restore? It seems like if you didn't then the free block bitmaps in the cylinder groups would contain garbage. John -- John Polstra [EMAIL PROTECTED] John D. Polstra Co., Inc.Seattle, Washington USA "Disappointment is a good sign of basic intelligence." -- Chögyam Trungpa To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Streamlining FreeBSD installations across many machines
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Rodney W. Grimes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A much faster way to do this is to just dd the first few megabytes of the disk (dd if=foo of=/dev/rXXd bs=32768 count=1024). Then use dump | restore to populate the disk. Do you run newfs on the receiving disk before the dump|restore? It seems like if you didn't then the free block bitmaps in the cylinder groups would contain garbage. Ooopsss.. left a step out... yes.. we newfs the disk after the dd operations. -- Rod Grimes - KD7CAX @ CN85sl - (RWG25) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
