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6 <title>Configuring the PicoBSD install floppy</title>
10 <h1>Configuring the PicoBSD install floppy</h1>
12 <p>The PicoBSD Install Floppy is engineered to be flexible since every
13 site has their own needs for an automated install solution. The
14 base package contains tools and frameworks for further
17 <h2>Generating an Install Image</h2>
19 <p>Central to the design of the install floppy is a tarball image of
20 the operating system. The install floppy downloads and extracts
21 the image from a master server. </p>
23 <p>To generate the install image:</p>
26 <li>Install and configure a machine as it should be
29 <li><em>Make the template machine as close to the target
30 machines as possible.</em> System-specific files such as
31 <tt>/etc/fstab</tt> can cause problems if they are
32 specific to a particular disk setup, such as multiple SCSI
33 disks in the template vs. single IDE disks in the target.
34 <li><em>Try to keep the template as small as practical.</em>
35 The more packages you install on the template, the larger
38 <li>Use tar to create the image. This shell script is useful
39 for automating the process.
42 TARBALL="/fbsdimage.tgz"
45 tar -cpvzf ${TARBALL} --totals --exclude '/proc/*' --exclude '/var/tmp/*' \
46 --exclude '/var/log/*' --exclude '/tmp/*' --exclude '/fbsdimage.tgz' /
49 <li>Use the '--exclude' argument to remove files from the
51 <li>Don't forget to exclude the image itself or your tarball
52 will be much larger than it should.
53 <li>The <b>GZIP</b> environment variable sets arguments to the
54 gzip command called by tar's z option.
56 <li>Copy the image file to your load server into a public FTP
60 <h2>Configuring the Install Floppy</h2>
62 <p>Once the install floppy has been built using the PicoBSD build
63 script, mount the floppy and modify the install
64 script, <tt>/floppy/etc/doinstall</tt>. <tt>doinstall</tt> is
65 called from rc on startup to install the disk image and perform
66 whatever other setup tasks are necessary. The script can set
67 network parameters, configure applications, select kernels, or
68 whatever else a shell script can do. A handful of useful
69 utilities is included on the disk to ease automated installation.</p>
71 <p>At minumum, set the URL to the FTP server holding the disk
72 image. If you wish, uncomment and modify to taste any of the
73 code blocks provided.</p>
75 <p>By default, the install floppy:</p>
77 <li>Creates one large FreeBSD slice on the first IDE disk (wd0).
78 <li>Creates a 256MB swap partition and the rest for a large
80 <li>Formats the large partition using <tt>newfs</tt> with
82 <li>Downloads the image via FTP and feeds it directly into
83 <tt>cpio</tt> for extraction.
86 <P>To modify the disk formatting parameters, modify the
87 <tt>/floppy/etc/prepdisk</tt> script. <tt>prepdisk</tt> is a
88 simple awk script that feeds directly into <tt>disklabel</tt>.
89 Simply edit the generated partition table to taste.</P>
94 <address><a href="mailto:dwhite@freebsd.org">Doug White</a></address>
95 <!-- Created: Thu Oct 7 21:42:17 PDT 1999 -->
97 Last modified: Thu Oct 7 22:18:22 PDT 1999