[BUGS] Puppet, FreeBSD deployment

[Andrew Snow]

On 24/02/12 15:23, Gregory Orange wrote:
> Once I've got some basic file management happening, I'd like to look
> into deploying entire machines with it. I've found this:
> http://puppetlabs.com/blog/your-os-installer-and-you/
>
> It mentions Kickstart and Preseed, and the next question that jumps
> into my head: What's the FreeBSD equivalent? Google isn't particularly
> helping me, so perhaps you fine folks can give me some direction.

What it boils down to is a procedure for getting a blank machine to the 
point where puppet is running.  It depends on how much time you want to 
spend setting it up and what the benefit will be:  perhaps just writing 
down some written steps to install FreeBSD and the puppet package and 
reboot?

Or do you build a virtual machine image and duplicate it every time you 
want a new machine? (Taking care to generate new host id and SSH and 
puppet TLS keys)

Or a custom install script which runs a copies FreeBSD onto the new 
machine's disk over a network.  A FreeBSD installation can be as simple 
as a dozen lines of shell script which partitions the disk, sets the 
hostname and ssh keys up, runs a "make install", and installs puppet.

This can be done from a running copy of FreeBSD on a $5 USB stick, so 
its easy to start playing around with that to get a better idea of what 
works for you.

Hope that helps,

- Andrew