[BUGS] Puppet, FreeBSD deployment

[Gregory Orange]

Thanks Andrew, this is the angle I was after.

On 24 February 2012 19:46, Andrew Snow <andrew at modulus.org> wrote:
> On 24/02/12 15:23, Gregory Orange wrote:
>> 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?

I'd like more automation than recorded manual steps.

> 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 sounds pretty promising - can you point me to one or more
references talking about such a script? I should have mentioned: We
actually already have an old imaging system built against FreeBSD 6.3,
so I now wonder how it compares to current practices. As an overview,
here's what ours does:
-creates slices & partitions
-restores previously dumped filesystems for / /usr /var from a network server
-portsnap (well, rsync from a local copy), install a few ports
-miscellaneous scripting for some file permissions, shell config etc

> 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.

The impression I'm getting here is that the most recognised method of
automatically installing FreeBSD is to clone an existing system,
perhaps a freshly installed one. That's pretty well the approach a
Gentoo-fan(atic?) friend of mine uses[1].

Hmm, a little more Googling lead me to this:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/pxe/

Any thoughts on Jumpstart as a potential candidate? It smacks a little
of Unattended(.sf.net) that I used for a few years to script-install
Windows XP.

-- 
Gregory Orange

[1] Unbeknownst to me at the time, Gentoo's package management system
(portage) was a good introduction to FreeBSD ports. Perhaps it's a
well-known parallel (: