On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Danny Howard wrote:
> I'm working on doing a FreeBSD jumpstat process based on
> http://people.freebsd.org/~alfred/pxe/
If you're at BSDCon please to my talk on it tomorrow. :-)
> My primary limitation is configurability - I need to be able to run sysinstall
> with a different install.cfg per install. So the first answer to that is
> "configure each client with a different PXE root and go from there."
I'm curious what differences you need. If it's radical or can't be
handled in post-install then you would be better off writing your own
installer.
> Then I get the irritation that I must diddle with an mfsroot image to change
> the install.cfg. I've been poring over what loader documentation I can find,
> but still haven't even figured out how the "let's go to mfsroot which will
> take us to sysinstall in the next stage" thing works ... there's nothing in
> mfsroot's /etc, for example ...
It isn't needed for the most part -- sysinstall runs as init in the
install environment so there's no /etc/rc* to run.
> >From loader.rc:
> load -t mfs_root /mfsroot
> [...]
> set vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/md0c"
> boot
>
> How is boot different from autoboot?
Autoboot is a variable; 'boot' does a countdown from 'autoboot' seconds.
> Can I get around having to load the mfs_root image and just dump it in
> the pxe boot directory? I'm getting a hunch that maybe I can do an
> NFS partition and set vfs.root.mountfrom to use NFS ...
You're shooting for an NFS-mounted root I bet, and I believe we have it
going on the lab machines here at the con. I'll have to pick them apart
and see what they do.
> Then, the other question is, how the heck does sysinstall get launched? If I
> can get at a script that launches sysinstall, I could set an install.cfg for
> sysinstall to run instead of having to point at differnt install.cfg's via
> dhcpd.conf ...
You're in the 'hack sysinstall' arena. You can recompile it to use a
different path for the install.cfg.
Doug White | FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | www.FreeBSD.org
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