Date: Mon, 7 Aug 1995 15:30:29 -0700 (PDT) From: ambrisko@tcs.com (Douglas Ambrisko) To: matte@sdf.luth.se (Karlsson Mattias) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Autoinstall for FreeBSD??? Message-ID: <9508072230.AA00708@cozumel.tcs.com> In-Reply-To: <199508072137.XAA12849@alkinoos.sdf.luth.se> from "Karlsson Mattias" at Aug 7, 95 11:37:31 pm
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Karlsson Mattias writes: | | Hello hackers! | | I was thinking to make an autoinstall feature for FreeBSD, almost | like the autoinstall for Solaris. | | Which would partition, install the operating system, config the kernel, | setup the config files and install aditional software (ports,packages) etc. | | I have looked at the install and config section and that part will not be the | hardest part. The trickiest part will probably be to know when a netbooting | computer is in "install mode" so what do you think about passing a flag to | the kernel and then make a program that could check what flags that where | passed to the kernel. And if the kernel whas passed the install flag it would | instead of starting init start a install script which would do the install and | partitioning and config work. Here is some insight on what I have done before to manage a cluster of UNIX boxes, with no sysadm and worked really well. - modify bootpd so that it sends a query to a network manager with the ethernet hardware address and use the reply from the network manager server instead of the bootptab file. - build a network manager server (I had little system icons etc to identify systems) to listen for the hardware ether address. When it gets a request from a new computer on the net (ie new hardware ether addess) assign is an IP out of a pool of IP's and tell it to load a special installation kernel (this could be very similar to the floppy kernel) and give it a rootfs like the floppy kernel. Modify sysinstall to do your default auto install and take some of the default info from the netboot config file. You can get the network config info to setup /etc/sysconfig vi the netboot config file. Reboot when you're done and now you should have a configured system on the net. [I also changed the colour of the icons to indicate the state of the machine] I also made a special kernel that would only boot off the local file-system. This was then passed to any machine that had already been loaded by the server. [the reason we did this was to eliminate net-traffic for the basic OS stuff] [we wanted each machine to boot the kernel from the net so we would know when a machine paniced and wouldn't need to do anything with special boot CD's etc. so we did this ...] - setup each work-station to boot of the net. This is basically done if you burn the netboot into the eprom and put that in the ethernet card. Now I did this on a totaly different UNIX platform, but clearly all the hooks needed are mostly there now. You also have the source to finish the 10% left to do -- if that. | Now i would like to get some comments, ideas and if any one have a better | idea to make the autoinstall then feel free to say so also feel free to | tell me what you think about this idea. | | If this is an idea you like, I would like to have some help with adding the | kernel flag and the program that checks the passed flags to the kernel. I think a system like this would be extremely helpfull in a student lab full of PC's running FreeBSD. You could disable the BIOS from booting the floppy (I think you can set a BIOS passwd to protect that) then it should be fairly safe except for net tampering etc. Doug A.
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