On 10/05/23 11:44, Harry Schmalzbauer wrote:
Hello,
back in times (sysinstall(8) aera), when geom(4) was extended for GPT
(and gpart(8) got the ability to write GPT labels) I created my own,
highly customized installer, which has the drawback that it still
requires a special distribution media (iso with cpio archives). My plans
to support the official ISO never materialized, but it's still providing
a sophisticated (auto-partitioning) ZFS and UFS setup job likewise for
UEFI and BIOS based system (emerged from a embedded project) and
provides a radical update concept: newfs (UFS factory snapshot with
auto-backup+restore, resp. new ZFS datasets). It is focused on
productive servers, with as much read-only mounts as possible (and
omitting dev bytes on those strictly productive machines) and was a
sysinstall(8) substitution.
Since the ammount of machines to deploy massively decreased for me, and
pkgbase seems to be more or less ready ('make packages' left a beautiful
repo), I want to replace my customized installation methods (transfering
all it's features for optional usage).
I don't have definitive answers to the other questions (details below),
but I'd suggest you use poudriere to generate the pkgbase repos. It has
the advantage of only replacing required packages on subsequent builds,
which helps if you happen to update and only a few files are modified
(leverages repeatable builds)
I'm planning to use whatever FreeBSD uses by default. Currently, it's
bsdinstall(8) I guess (which I never used), but I'm not sure if it is
planned that bsdinstall(8) will be made pkgbase compatible.
I rarely install new machines from scratch, but for now my strategy has
been to perform a classic install and then just dump base packages over
them, removing unwanted packages later.
Crude but works, for my needs. Definitely not acceptable if you want to
automate installing more than one machine at a time. So I have little
insight in this regard.
--
Guido Falsi <m...@madpilot.net>
