Re: Automated install (again)

[David Laight <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost>]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 06:34:24PM +0200, Roger Pau Monne wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I saw there was a post about having something similar to Debian FAI on
> NetBSD, and I'm really interested in that feature. I will explain a
> little bit the reason why this feature would be useful in my case.
> 
> The Xen.org project has a test system, to assure that each change
> committed doesn't break anything. The test system performs automatic
> installs of several Linux distributions on bare metal, and tests Xen on
> them. Since the number of physical machines is probably lower than the
> number of OSes to test, and we always want to perform a clean install
> before we start testing, the hosts are installed automatically and
> without user interaction (usually by passing a file that contains the
> answers to the questions asked by the installer).
> 
> Adding NetBSD to this test system will help finding bugs much more
> faster, and prevent newer features from breaking NetBSD support.
> 
> So, to get to the point, is there any chance to have such a feature
> added to sysinst?

It is probably just working out what you need to do - then using
the 'tool' versions of the programs to set the disk up.

IIRC you need (for i386/amd64):
1) type 169 mbr partition - probably the entire disk, with the mbr boot code.
2) bootxx_ffsv<x> copied to the start of the mbr partition
3) netbsd disklabel in sector 1 of the partition
4) newfs
5) untar the install sets
6) update the machine-specific config files
7) copy the required kernel to /netbsd
8) anything I've missed.
9) reboot

If you do (2) before (3) you can use dd instead of installboot.

sysinst really doesn't do anything clever, it is a lot of tests (etc)
to allow for all sorts of different disk partitioning choices.

        David

-- 
David Laight: david%l8s.co.uk@localhost