Re: Automated install (again)

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

Roger Pau Monne wrote:
> 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.

I was wrong, actually there is a guide that explains how to do this:

http://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/how_to_create_bootable_netbsd_image/

Sorry for the noise.