Re-familiarizing myself with NetBSD sysinst for installing 10.0 x86... My goal is to make a couple minor config changes to a newly-installed system, prior to the final reboot. E.g. add serial console config and an optional addition to sshd_config; these make my post-installation setup easier.
After the system disk is partitioned and sets are installed, plus any "Configure the additional items as needed" (network, Timezone, etc.), sysinst has a couple options to run a shell, i.e. the "Utility menu" with "Run /bin/sh", or simply "Exit Install System" before "Reboot", which drops to a root shell prompt. This is all good, but by that point sysinst has already unmounted the newly-installed sysdisk and removed disk wedges etc. Leaving just the installation media mounted. After poking around and reading dkctl(8), I worked out the basics of re-mounting the sysdisk / partition from sysinst's /bin/sh, e.g. 'dkctl wd0 makewedges' and 'mount /dev/dkN /mnt', so I can tweak the config files I'm interested in. This works OK for me, but I'm wondering if other folks have better ideas. I don't see an obvious sysinst menu option for this kind of activity. Alternatively, I imagine I could probably modify NetBSD installation set(s) to include the changes I want, but I believe I prefer to handle it with a (documented) procedure rather than maintaining customized NetBSD installation images. FWIW, long ago I didn't deal with this situation much, as the hardware I was running NetBSD on could natively use serial console -- Sun, DEC, and SGI. So I might do an initial post-install setup from serial console and complete the configuration over network. PC's aren't quite as nice for out-of-band access like that. :-) Thanks, sr.
