Add documentation for the PicoBSD install floppy.

This commit is contained in:
Doug White 1999-10-08 05:20:06 +00:00
parent 88e4dbacdb
commit f691269881
2 changed files with 100 additions and 1 deletions
release/picobsd/doc/src

@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
DATE!="date"
DOCS= bugs.html faq.html hardware.html how2build.html \
intrinsics.html intro.html TODO.html
intrinsics.html intro.html TODO.html installflp.html
all: ../../Version
for i in ${DOCS}; \

@ -0,0 +1,99 @@
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
<!-- $FreeBSD$ -->
<html>
<head>
<title>Configuring the PicoBSD install floppy</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Configuring the PicoBSD install floppy</h1>
<p>The PicoBSD Install Floppy is engineered to be flexible since every
site has their own needs for an automated install solution. The
base package contains tools and frameworks for further
customization. </p>
<h2>Generating an Install Image</h2>
<p>Central to the design of the install floppy is a tarball image of
the operating system. The install floppy downloads and extracts
the image from a master server. </p>
<p>To generate the install image:</p>
<ol>
<li>Install and configure a machine as it should be
installed.
<ul>
<li><em>Make the template machine as close to the target
machines as possible.</em> System-specific files such as
<tt>/etc/fstab</tt> can cause problems if they are
specific to a particular disk setup, such as multiple SCSI
disks in the template vs. single IDE disks in the target.
<li><em>Try to keep the template as small as practical.</em>
The more packages you install on the template, the larger
the image becomes.
</ul>
<li>Use tar to create the image. This shell script is useful
for automating the process.
<blockquote><pre>
#!/bin/sh
TARBALL="/fbsdimage.tgz"
GZIP="-9"
tar -cpvzf ${TARBALL} --totals --exclude '/proc/*' --exclude '/var/tmp/*' \
--exclude '/var/log/*' --exclude '/tmp/*' --exclude '/fbsdimage.tgz' /
</pre></blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Use the '--exclude' argument to remove files from the
image.
<li>Don't forget to exclude the image itself or your tarball
will be much larger than it should.
<li>The <b>GZIP</b> environment variable sets arguments to the
gzip command called by tar's z option.
</ul>
<li>Copy the image file to your load server into a public FTP
directory.
</ol>
<h2>Configuring the Install Floppy</h2>
<p>Once the install floppy has been built using the PicoBSD build
script, mount the floppy and modify the install
script, <tt>/floppy/etc/doinstall</tt>. <tt>doinstall</tt> is
called from rc on startup to install the disk image and perform
whatever other setup tasks are necessary. The script can set
network parameters, configure applications, select kernels, or
whatever else a shell script can do. A handful of useful
utilities is included on the disk to ease automated installation.</p>
<p>At minumum, set the URL to the FTP server holding the disk
image. If you wish, uncomment and modify to taste any of the
code blocks provided.</p>
<p>By default, the install floppy:</p>
<ul>
<li>Creates one large FreeBSD slice on the first IDE disk (wd0).
<li>Creates a 256MB swap partition and the rest for a large
root partition.
<li>Formats the large partition using <tt>newfs</tt> with
default parameters. '
<li>Downloads the image via FTP and feeds it directly into
<tt>cpio</tt> for extraction.
</ul>
<P>To modify the disk formatting parameters, modify the
<tt>/floppy/etc/prepdisk</tt> script. <tt>prepdisk</tt> is a
simple awk script that feeds directly into <tt>disklabel</tt>.
Simply edit the generated partition table to taste.</P>
<hr>
<address><a href="mailto:dwhite@freebsd.org">Doug White</a></address>
<!-- Created: Thu Oct 7 21:42:17 PDT 1999 -->
<!-- hhmts start -->
Last modified: Thu Oct 7 22:18:22 PDT 1999
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</body>
</html>