Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 11:04:05 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: gkshenaut@ucdavis.edu, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: roll-in installation? Message-ID: <19980225110405.40141@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <199802232215.OAA06420@myrtle1.bogs.org>; from Greg Shenaut on Mon, Feb 23, 1998 at 02:14:48PM -0800 References: <199802232215.OAA06420@myrtle1.bogs.org>
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On Mon, 23 February 1998 at 14:14:48 -0800, Greg Shenaut wrote: > Is there a mechanism already in place which would allow a hands-off > roll-in installation from SCSI tape of a FreeBSD distribution onto > a virgin machine? What I have in mind would be auto-generating a > tape image of the model system using some combination of dump, tar, > and dd, along with parameter blocks containing information for > fdisk/mkfs/format. Then you boot to a floppy containing code which > can deal with the tape; it rolls it in, and, presto changeo, you've > got a complete, bootable, system only needing its rc.conf file > edited in order to run. (Assuming the model has the same hardware > as the target, of course.) > > Has anyone done this? What I've done is to make one installation, copy a disk image to tape, and then restore it to other disks, thus creating a complete clone of the first machine. This sounds like it would fit your bill. The problem was, I did it under BSD/OS, and I ran into trouble when I tried it on FreeBSD a couple of years ago. I don't know whether it's since possible, but there are some problems related to writing to a raw disk. You could try it. To back up a complete disk to tape, # dd if=/dev/rsd0c of=/dev/rst0 bs=32b To restore: # dd of=/dev/rsd0c if=/dev/rst0 bs=32b If it doesn't work, please tell me and I'll try to work out why not. Greg To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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