freebsd stable - Apr 2007 - Alternate installers for FreeBSD for unattended installation

I'm having a difficult time developing a scripted install using
sysinstall, as my target hardware is not sufficiently uniform,
hostnames vary, etc.  The sysinstall documentation implies that
alternatives are available, and that sysinstall is not really
supported any more.  Where can I find these alternate installers?  Do
they have better support for scripted installations?

Is it possible to perform the installation manually from the mfsroot
image?  If so, I guess I could develop a shell script that performs
the installation steps.

Best wishes,
Matthew

-- 
"Rogues are very keen in their profession, and know already much more
than we can teach them respecting their several kinds of roguery."
  - A. C. Hobbs in _Locks and Safes_ (1853)
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On Friday 27 April 2007 08:15, Matthew X. Economou
wrote:
> I'm having a difficult time developing a scripted install using
> sysinstall, as my target hardware is not sufficiently uniform,
> hostnames vary, etc.  The sysinstall documentation implies that
> alternatives are available, and that sysinstall is not really
> supported any more.  Where can I find these alternate installers?  Do
> they have better support for scripted installations?
>
> Is it possible to perform the installation manually from the mfsroot
> image?  If so, I guess I could develop a shell script that performs
> the installation steps.
You can get sysinstall to do most of the work for you and then fix 
things up after the fact by running a script. My install.cfg does a 
basic install and then untar's an image over the top which I created by 
doing an installworld into a chroot and installing ports into.

Unfortunately you can't easily alter rc.conf because sysinstall 
overwrites it thinking it is an old copy. (You end up with your entries 
commented out).

I've been working on a patch for sysinstall so you can specify it merge 
entries together without uncommenting the old ones but I haven't 
finished it yet.

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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