On Thursday 04 March 2010 4:33:29 pm David Wolfskill wrote: > For reasons that may well be idiosyncratic, I like to set up FreeBSD > machines to have at least 2 bootable slices -- e.g., one can act as a > fallback if an attempted software upgrade proves to have been ill-timed. > > In the past, I've done this manually; while a bit tedious & fairly > "target-rich" with opportunities for human error, it's something that is > typically done infrequently (i.e., once) in the life of a machine (or at > least its boot drive). > > At work, the IT folks use a scripted sysinstall(8) to set machines up; > to increase the probability that I'll be able to get 3 "special" > machines set up the way I want, I'm trying to set up a sysinstall config > file to make this as painless as possible. > > I managed to get a copy of the config script IT uses, so I had a > starting-point ... but they were setting the machines up with > > partition=exclusive > > which doesn't seem like a good choice for what I'm doing. :-} > > > After my first attempt failed, I poked around on the Net & found > <http://www.nntpnews.net/f2458/what-proper-install-cfg-configuring-multiple- slices-4387807/>, > (dated 18-11-08, 10:40 PM ), in which Peter Steele describes something > similar to what I was about to try next, and writes: > > | My intent here is to create three slices-one 6GB in size, another 1GB in > | size, and the third sized to consume the remaining free space. When I > | run this through sysinstall, it complains that it can't find the space > | for the partitions. It even complains that it can't find any free space. > | Because the slices don't get created, the subsequent label assignments > | fail as well. What is the proper commands for creating multiple slices > | in install.cfg? > > In a foillowup, he writes: > > | After a lot of experimenting, my impression is that sysinstall simply > | doesn't support multiple slice installations. It works to a point, but I > | get some unexpected errors, e.g. > | > | Unable to make device node for /dev/ad0s1a in /dev > > which doesn't seem very encouraging. > > > Would someone please either confirm the limitation or provide a > suitable excerpt from a sysinstall config script to demonstrate > that it is actually possible? (Or show me where it's spelled out in the > man page....) > > (I'm using 7.x sysinstall, if that matters.)
If you are doing a fully scripted install you may be better off just using a dedicated shell script to format your disks and mount them and then use the various *-install.sh scripts from the release distributions to install the code. You could still do this via sysinstall by sticking your shell script in /stand in the MFS root and having your sysinstall script just run that script. You might want to build a custom mfsroot to add some more useful tools though. I really think sysinstall needs to support a disk "backdoor" whereby the user can either manually partition disks and then mount them at /mnt (or have a script do it), and tell sysinstall to just skip the disk stuff and assume /mnt is mounted. -- John Baldwin _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"