Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2008 18:16:21 -0800 From: Doug Hardie <bc979@lafn.org> To: freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Creating a custom install disk Message-ID: <315F04DD-EBF3-451D-99C2-1C3B2D821522@lafn.org>
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I have a number of servers that I am going to be updating to FreeBSD 7 from 6.2. I have built a new base system with all the configurations and ports and local code that I need. This process takes about 2 days from the distribution CDs. I need a way to clone this machine and install on the others. My first idea was a custom install disk. The make release process does not appear to do what I want. It would install a GENERIC kernel and take the config files from the distribution. LiveCD was tried, but it fails with numerous attempts to write to directories that do not exist. I expect I could manually create those directories, but I am not sure what it would actually install since it too builds a new GENERIC (but slightly modified) kernel. I tried creating a dump file of the new machine and restoring it on the old one. I did root first and was going to then do /usr, but the alterations to root were such that the system just couldn't keep going through the process. That what I had expected, but it was worth a try. I have not tried this, but perhaps it might work. Creating the dump files on the new machine, booting the old from the live filesystem cd, recreating the filesystems on disk and then restoring from the dump files on the new system. That would require a good net connection between the 2 machines. Is there a better way to do this?
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