[nycbug-talk] rc.conf / rc'ng hacking

[Isaac Levy]

Hi Mark,

A couple of comments (some of them obvious):

- How many boxes, and how physically close are they?
Performing the buildworld/buildkernel dance, tar-piping /usr/src to N machines, and install/mergemaster seems pretty simple and scriptable, except for,

- The mfsroot bit:
You want to change disk layout without PXE booting, or local disk access- on what sounds like unknown/aging hardware.
I'd think this would fail all over the place, the smallest inconsistency would leave the boxes unusable, requiring physical intervention.
Tell us how this goes...

--
The rc.conf bit:
I'd personally copy the files outright to a separate server, possibly toss some comment bits in at the top with other machine info- (ethernet mac addr for id, phyical locaiton, etc...)

All that auto-parsing to generate the rc.conf bits just sounds trange.

--
One last sanity-check question: how many boxes are we talking about, and are you sure the procedure you outline below is cheaper than a fistfull of bootable USB keys, and some install.cfg defaults?

Best,
.ike



On Oct 13, 2011, at 11:32 AM, Mark Saad wrote:

> All
> I am working on a system to reinstall some of my remote freebsd
> servers . I can not PXE boot them so here is the idea.
> 
> 1. Ship a newer kernel to the remote box , which is running
> 6.x-RELEASE . In my case I have tarballs of 7.x-RELEASE, and
> 8.x-RELEASE made from
> the install media's kernel/generic.?? files
> 2. Ship a custom mfsroot to the remote box, based in part on the one I
> use for local jumpstarts
> 3. Ship a loader.conf and loader.rc that instructs the remote box to
> boot kernel=GENERIC and load the mfsroot and use it as its rootfs
> 
> So in this state if I reboot the remote server it will boot up and
> follow the install.cfg I have in the mfsroot and I will have wiped out
> the remote server,
> changed the disk layout, which is important to me here, and upgraded
> it to 7.x-RELEASE or 8.x-RELEASE depending on what I ship to that box.
> 
> So here is my question, I want to preserve the original rc.conf from
> the old install. Here is an example.
> 
> hostname="eir-web30"
> defaultrouter="10.9.8.30"
> ifconfig_bge0="inet 10.9.8.230 netmask 255.255.254.0 media 100baseTX
> mediaopt full-duplex"
> 
> 
> So my idea here was to have the script that creates and ships the
> custom mfsroot fetch the rc.conf from the server I am going to
> reinstall
> and then grab some info from the rc.conf .
> 
> So following how I use install.cfg I need to grab the NIC type and and
> well I could search for the first line that do not start with # and
> look at the line with ifconfig then take the text after _ to the = and
> set that as my NIC type.
> 
> So I was tired,lazy yesterday and I was wondering how does rc'ng
> handle this , surely there has to be a rc'ng function to suck in from
> rc.subr that I can call to get my nic type etc . I cant find anything,
> can someone shed some light on how this handled ? Is there an easier
> way to this ?
> 
> ---
> Mark Saad | mark.saad at ymail.com
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