Before FreeBSD may be installed on the target system, it is necessary to build the minimal FreeBSD operating system image which will boot from the hard drive. This way the new system can be accessed from the network, and the rest of the installation can be done without remote access to the system console.
The mfsBSD tool-set can be used to build a tiny FreeBSD image. As the name of mfsBSD suggests (“mfs” means “memory file system”), the resulting image runs entirely from a ramdisk. Thanks to this feature, the manipulation of hard drives will not be limited, therefore it will be possible to install a complete FreeBSD operating system. The home page of mfsBSD, at http://people.freebsd.org/~mm/mfsbsd/, includes pointers to the latest release of the toolset.
Please note that the internals of mfsBSD and how it all fits together is beyond the scope of this article. The interested reader should consult the original documentation of mfsBSD for more details.
Download and extract the latest mfsBSD release and change your working directory to the directory where the mfsBSD scripts will reside:
#
fetch http://people.freebsd.org/~mm/mfsbsd/mfsbsd-latest.tar.gz
#
tar xvzf mfsbsd-1.0-beta1
.tar.gz
#
cd mfsbsd-1.0-beta1
/
Before booting mfsBSD, a few important configuration options have to be set. The most important that we have to get right is, naturally, the network setup. The most suitable method to configure networking options depends on whether we know beforehand the type of the network interface we will use, and the network interface driver to be loaded for our hardware. We will see how mfsBSD can be configured in either case.
Another important thing to set is the
root
password. This can be done by editing
the conf/rootpw.conf
file. Please keep in
mind that the file will contain your password in the plain text,
thus we do not recommend to use real password here.
Nevertheless, this is just a temporary one-time password which
can be later changed in a live system.
When the installed network interface card is unknown, we
can use the auto-detection features of
mfsBSD. The startup scripts of
mfsBSD can detect the correct
driver to use, based on the MAC address of the interface, if
we set the following options in
conf/interfaces.conf
:
Do not forget to add the defaultrouter
information to the conf/rc.conf
file:
When the network interface driver is known, it is more
convenient to use the conf/rc.conf
file
for networking options. The syntax of this file is the same
as the one used in the standard rc.conf(5) file of
FreeBSD.
For example, if you know that a re(4) network
interface is going to be available, you can set the following
options in conf/rc.conf
:
The process of building an mfsBSD image is pretty straightforward.
The first step is to mount the FreeBSD installation
CD, or the installation
ISO image to /cdrom
. For the sake of example,
in this article we will assume that you have downloaded the FreeBSD
7.0-RELEASE ISO. Mounting this ISO image to
the /cdrom
directory is
easy with the mdconfig(8) utility:
#
mdconfig -a -t vnode -u 10 -f 7.0-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso
#
mount_cd9660 /dev/md10 /cdrom
Next, build the bootable mfsBSD image:
#
make BASE=/cdrom/7.0-RELEASE
The above make
command has to be run
from the top level of the mfsBSD
directory tree, i.e. ~/mfsbsd-1.0-beta1/
.
Now that the mfsBSD image is ready, it must be uploaded to the remote system running a live rescue system or pre-installed Linux® distribution. The most suitable tool for this task is scp:
#
scp disk.img root@192.168.0.2:.
To boot mfsBSD image properly, it
must be placed on the first (bootable) device of the given
machine. This may be accomplished using this example providing
that sda
is the first bootable disk
device:
#
dd if=/root/disk.img of=/dev/sda bs=1m
If all went well, the image should now be in the
MBR of the first device and the machine can
be rebooted. Watch for the machine to boot up properly with the
ping(8) tool. Once it has came back on-line, it should be
possible to access it over ssh(1) as user
root
with the configured password.
This, and other documents, can be downloaded from http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
For questions about FreeBSD, read the
documentation before
contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.