It's been incredibly busy for us in iXsystems land, with a lot of irons in the fire.
One of the many things we've been working on is a new installer. Several months ago pc-sysinstall was imported into HEAD from the PC-BSD project. pc-sysinstall is a fine tool, and very useful as the backend for doing scripted installs. If you're using scripted sysinstall I recommend you check it out, it's a lot easier to use and configure than sysinstall, the documentation is much better, and reasonable requests for functionality can and will be brought in. This is all fine and good, but without a front end to generate the config files pc-sysinstall needs it's not much use to an end user for doing installs. We (and by we I mean the forces at iXsystems) have been working on txt- sysinstall, which is a front end for pc-sysinstall using curses and dialog to generate a pc-sysinstall config file from user input. What we've encountered is that doing disk configuration in dialog isn't possible, and we started down the road of using curses....but we already have a curses and dialog based installer, and wouldn't it be neat if we could use the disk configuration tool we are writing for FreeNAS, too bad it's a web app..... But if the installer just launched a web server..... Ok, wait a minute, that couldn't work...how would you configure networking? Oh wait, that's already solved in FreeNAS, before you access the system you use a console/CLI app to configure the network. Ok, but people do installs over serial ports....oh wait, you could run lynx from the console too... We quickly realized that the objections we could come up with were easily overcome, and the more we talked to people here at MeetBSD the more we realized it was a viable (and good) idea. People quickly came up with improvements. This gets us the best of both worlds. Want a super fancy GUI installer, just hit the box with firefox or whatever from a full desktop, want a text interface that's simple, need low bandwidth, running over a serial port, use the embedded lynx browser. Installing in a remote vm/cloud, just configure the ip and hit it with a browser (yes, we're dreaming up ways to do it over ssl and such) I'll do a better write-up very soon, I'm pretty tired now and have a long weekend looming, but just wanted to get the word out. Just to give credit where credit is due, this all started with Warner Losh saying, "Can you listen to a crazy idea I had?" It didn't take long to realize that it wasn't crazy, it was a stroke of genius. Secondary props go to Philip Paeps and Kris Moore for implementation details, Matt Olander for recognizing the benefits and approving the change in focus, John Hixson for the priceless look on his face when he realized we were serious about changing (He's done the bulk of the work on txt-sysinstall) the random NetBSD user here at MeetBSD (sorry I don't know his name) who said it was a horrible idea because it would "bloat the installer way too much" (I'm still laughing at that, he was saying something about floppies too, I guess we're locking out people using 386's or something.) and quite a few other people who are too countless to mention but offered random advice or encouragement. -- Thanks, Josh Paetzel FreeBSD -- The power to serve
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