Re: Automated install (again)

[Roger Pau Monne <roger.pau%citrix.com@localhost>]

David Laight wrote:
> 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

I think that the easiest way to do this is to create my own INSTALL
kernel, with a non interactive install.sh script that replaces
distrib/amd64/installimage/install.sh. I've made a copy of installimage
and renamed that to myinstallimage,, I've also tried changing the
Makefile in distrib/amd64/ to include my folder, but so far I haven't
been able to couple the INSTALL kernel with myinstallimage, and there
doesn't seem to be much information around about how to do such a task.
If someone has experience with that I would greatly appreciate some
guidance.

Thanks, Roger.