Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2011 10:26:33 -0600 From: Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org> To: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-sysinstall@freebsd.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org, grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD Installer Roadmap Message-ID: <4D63E3B9.8030308@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <201102220745.45695.jhb@freebsd.org> References: <AANLkTi=VM1qGLrvjDJnhafi5=B4DCmL85CKmyOF7t9Sp@mail.gmail.com> <201102220745.45695.jhb@freebsd.org>
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On 02/22/11 06:45, John Baldwin wrote: > On Saturday, February 19, 2011 4:34:11 am grarpamp wrote: >> Sysinstall is fine, as I'm sure any replacement will be. So I'll >> just note a few things I'd like to see in any such replacement... >> >> 1 - I used install.cfg's on floppies to clone systems, a lot. Hands >> on the box were needed with that. Operators skills were in question, >> so having them use the dialog menus properly was a pain and often >> resulted in non-zeroed disk or half built systems. And though all >> else was cloned, it needed a separate<host>.cfg for each box due >> to: >> >> fqdn, gateway, ip/mask >> interface - sometimes changed >> root disk - sometimes changed >> >> Would have killed for a simple console shell script to ask those >> questions of the operator, per machine. > > Actually, you can do that if you are a bit creative (add a few more tools to > the mfsroot, and use the 'system' command in install.cfg to invoke a shell > script that then generates a foo.cfg you later include via loadConfig, but > I've covered that at multiple conferences by now). That said, I'm hopeful > that the new installer will be more flexible in less hackish ways while > letting you do things like PXE boot to a shell where you can use mfiutil to > create a RAID-5 volume and then invoke the installer on that, etc. This is something that I very explicitly built in to the design of bsdinstall. When the installer starts (as well as at several other points), you are offered an option to bring up a shell specifically to do things like this. Scripted installs are just shell scripts instead of a configuration file, so it is trivial to interleave complicated things like this. -Nathan
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