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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