Re: Automated install (again)

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

Manuel Bouyer 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?
>>
>> I've done a quick look at the code, and it seems it won't be really
>> difficult to load a file and fill all the necessary global variables
>> from there, after having all the necessary information it's just a
>> matter of calling all the functions, md_pre_disklabel, write_disklabel,
>> and so on... Maybe someone more familiar with sysinst has a better
>> option about that.
> 
> I think you can use anita for that (http://www.gson.org/netbsd/anita/).
> It's python so I guess it can rum from linux as well.

Although anita is powerful I don't think it will work well with the
existing test infrastructure without requiring a lot of changes there,
so my first option is to try to create a custom INSTALL kernel that
performs a simple NetBSD install automatically. Thanks for the pointer
anyway!

Roger.