On 2010-04-21, Daniel Barowy <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 21 Apr 2010, Chris Cappuccio wrote: >> >> To make your deployment faster, just use fdisk, disklabel, newfs to setup >> the disk and tar to copy the files. That's a much smarter/faster way to go, >> even with TRIM support. I automated it in 'growimg' for flashdist/flashrd, >> for instance. Of course that assumes you only have one disklabel partition, >> but your servers are probably more complicated than that. >> >> > > The nice thing about dd is that it is simple-- you can set up a system > with a shell one-liner and after the reboot, just change a few config > files. The idea is that novice administrators on our staff could get > something up and running quickly.
It's simpler, until your CF vendor decides to change to a slightly smaller device. And then you wish you spent the extra 2 minutes writing a quick shell script to untar things rather than dd, or a site*.tgz for the installer.. > The reality is that our novice administrators rarely do any real server > deployment-- it's really just me and another guy-- so when it comes down > to it, this is just a time-saving measure for us. The genesis of it was > from doing this with CF onto Soekris or other SBCs where actually doing an > install directly onto the CF is a PITA (do the install in a VM, then dd > the VM's disk). It doesn't need to be simple as long as it saves time and > errors. So I think I will indeed look into ideas like yours. I like > Chris Dukes' suggestion to replace baseXX.tgz and use the installer, since > unlike Soekris boxes, these machines have CD readers and video hardware. Sounds like you *really* need to learn pxeboot(8). It's very very straightforward on OpenBSD.
