From owner-freebsd-config  Wed Jul  5 12:38:40 2000
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To: Reinoud van Leeuwen <reinoud@xs4all.nl>
Cc: jkh@FreeBSD.org, alex@nait.nl, dave@nait.nl, config@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: Jumpstart alike tool for FreeBSD 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 03 Jul 2000 15:58:09 +0200."
             <200007031358.PAA04617@webmail1.xs4all.nl> 
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 12:39:26 -0700
Message-ID: <42000.962825966@localhost>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.osd.bsdi.com>
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> We talked briefly about this on the Usenix party. We are in need of
> a tool for FreeBSD that will enable us to do automated installs for
> a large number of FreeBSD boxes. Solaris has a product called
> Jumpstart that has several nice features we would like to see on
> FreeBSD.  If we cannot find anything suitable we will develop it
> ourselves.  You said that something like that is currently being
> developed for FreeBSD. Can you give us some pointers to were I can
> find information? If other people are working on the same kind of
> things, it would be better to work together that to try reinveting
> the wheel again.

Hi Guys,

Sorry for the miscommunication.  What I thought I said at the USENIX
party was that we were intending to work on such a thing, not that
such work had already started.  It's my intention to do this in two
phases:

1. I will work on ripping all the useful bits of code out of sysinstall
   for a libinstall library which handles media selection, I/O, disk
   labelling and filesystem creation, etc.  Then I will revamp sysinstall
   to use this library.

2. Begin working on a jumpstart tool which takes a more "batch
   oriented" approach to the installation problem and also uses
   libinstall to do the guts of the work.

Unsolved is the issue of a more comprehensive "media map file" which
can be read on a given media to tell where everything, from bindist to
bash, can be found on that or other related media.  Then the
libinstall library could even handle media change requests,
e.g. requests like "please remove CD #1 (Basic Installation) from your
drive and insert CD #2 (Extra Utils)."  Right now, sysinstall just
goes after everything on a single media item, be it a CDROM or an FTP
site, and throws up its hands if it can't find it.  That would be a
piece which could be written by someone else while I did the
libinstall work.

Since this is also a fairly critical item on our current TODO lists, I
intend to start the libinstall work just as soon as I return from our
annual 3 day "management summit" meeting on Saturday.  Sigh.  I never
had to deal with stuff like that as a consultant. :)

- Jordan


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