Copyright © 2008 The FreeBSD Documentation Project
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This article documents the remote installation of the FreeBSD
operating system when the console of the remote system is
unavailable. The main idea behind this article is the result of
a collaboration with Martin Matuska <mm@FreeBSD.org> with valuable input provided by
Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@FreeBSD.org>.
There are many server hosting providers in the world, but very few of them are officially supporting FreeBSD. They usually provide support for a Linux® distribution to be installed on the servers they offer.
In some cases, these companies will install your preferred Linux® distribution if you request it. Using this option, we will attempt to install FreeBSD. In other cases, they may offer a rescue system which would be used in an emergency. It's possible to use this for our purposes as well.
This article covers the basic installation and configuration steps required to bootstrap a remote installation of FreeBSD with RAID-1 and ZFS capabilities.
This section will summarize the purpose of this article and better explain what is covered herein. The instructions included in this article will benefit those using services provided by colocation facilities not supporting FreeBSD.
As we have mentioned in the Background section, many of the reputable server hosting companies provide some kind of rescue system, which is booted from their LAN and accessible over SSH. They usually provide this support in order to help their customers fix broken operating systems. As this article will explain, it is possible to install FreeBSD with the help of these rescue systems.
The next section of this article will describe how to configure, and build minimalistic FreeBSD on the local machine. That version will eventually be running on the remote machine from a ramdisk, which will allow us to install a complete FreeBSD operating system from an FTP mirror using the sysinstall utility.
The rest of this article will describe the installation procedure itself, as well as the configuration of the ZFS file system.
To continue successfully, you must:
Have a network accessible operating system with SSH access
Understand the FreeBSD installation process
Be familiar with the sysinstall(8) utility
Have the FreeBSD installation ISO image or CD handy
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:
initconf_interfaces="ext1" initconf_mac_ext1="00:00:00:00:00:00" initconf_ip_ext1="192.168.0.2" initconf_netmask_ext1="255.255.255.0"
Do not forget to add the defaultrouter
information to the conf/rc.conf
file:
defaultrouter="192.168.0.1"
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:
defaultrouter="192.168.0.1" ifconfig_re0="inet 192.168.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0"
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
Note:
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.
The mfsBSD has been successfully booted and it should be possible to log in through ssh(1). This section will describe how to create and label slices, set up gmirror for RAID-1, and how to use sysinstall to install a minimal distribution of the FreeBSD operating system.
The first task is to allocate disk space for FreeBSD, i.e.: to create slices and partitions. Obviously, the currently running system is fully loaded in system memory and therefore there will be no problems with manipulating hard drives. To complete this task, it is possible to use either sysinstall or fdisk(8) in conjunction to bsdlabel(8).
At the start, mark all system disks as empty. Repeat the following command for each hard drive:
#dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 count=2
Next, create slices and label them with your preferred tool.
While it is considered easier to use
sysinstall, a powerful and also
probably less buggy method will be to use standard text-based
UNIX® tools, such as fdisk(8) and bsdlabel(8), which
will also be covered in this section. The former option is well
documented in the Installing FreeBSD
chapter of the FreeBSD Handbook. As it was mentioned in the
introduction, this article will present how to set up a system
with RAID-1 and ZFS capabilities.
Our set up will consist of a small gmirror(8) mirrored
/ (root), /usr and /var file systems, and the rest of
the disk space will be allocated for a zpool(8) mirrored
ZFS file system. Please note, that
the ZFS file system will be
configured after the FreeBSD operating system is successfully
installed and booted.
The following example will describe how to create slices and labels, initialize gmirror(8) on each partition and how to create a UFS2 file system in each mirrored partition:
#fdisk -BI /dev/ad0
#fdisk -BI /dev/ad1#bsdlabel -wB /dev/ad0s1
#bsdlabel -wB /dev/ad1s1#bsdlabel -e /dev/ad0s1
#bsdlabel /dev/ad0s1 > /tmp/bsdlabel.txt && bsdlabel -R /dev/ad1s1 /tmp/bsdlabel.txt
#gmirror label root /dev/ad[01]s1a
#gmirror label var /dev/ad[01]s1d#gmirror label usr /dev/ad[01]s1e#gmirror label -F swap /dev/ad[01]s1b
#newfs /dev/mirror/root
#newfs /dev/mirror/var#newfs /dev/mirror/usr
| Create a slice covering the entire disk and initialize the boot code contained in sector 0 of the given disk. Repeat this command for all hard drives in the system. |
| Write a standard label for each disk including the bootstrap code. |
| Now, manually edit the label of the given disk. Refer
to the bsdlabel(8) manual page in order to find out how
to create partitions. Create partitions
|
| Import the recently created label for the second hard drive, so both hard drives will be labeled in the same way. |
| Initialize gmirror(8) on each partition. |
| Note the |
| Create a UFS2 file system on each mirrored partition. |
This is the most important part. This section will describe how to actually install the minimal distribution of FreeBSD on the hard drives that we have prepared in the previous section. To accomplish this goal, all file systems need to be mounted so sysinstall may write the contents of FreeBSD to the hard drives:
#mount /dev/mirror/root /mnt#mkdir /mnt/var /mnt/usr#mount /dev/mirror/var /mnt/var#mount /dev/mirror/usr /mnt/usr
When you are done, start sysinstall(8). Select the
installation from the main
menu. Select and press
Enter. With the help of arrow keys, move the
cursor on the Install Root item, press
Space and change it to /mnt. Press
Enter to submit your changes and exit the
menu by pressing
q.
Warning:
Note that this step is very important and if skipped, sysinstall will be unable to install FreeBSD.
Go to the menu,
move the cursor with the arrow keys on the
Minimal option, and check it by pressing
Space. This article uses the Minimal
distribution in order to save network traffic, because the
system itself will be installed over
ftp. Exit this menu by choosing
Exit option.
Note:
The and menus will be skipped, as these are useless now.
In the menu, select
FTP. Select the nearest mirror and let
sysinstall assume that the network is
already configured. You will be returned back to the
menu.
Finally, perform the system installation by selecting the last option, . Exit sysinstall when it finishes the installation.
The FreeBSD operating system should be installed now; however, the process is not finished yet. It is necessary to perform some post installation steps in order to allow FreeBSD to boot in the future and to be able to log in to the system.
You must now chroot(8) into the freshly installed system in order to finish the installation. Use the following command:
#chroot /mnt
To complete our goal, perform these steps:
Copy the
GENERICkernel to the/boot/kerneldirectory:#cp -Rp /boot/GENERIC/* /boot/kernelCreate the
/etc/rc.conf,/etc/resolv.confand/etc/fstabfiles. Do not forget to properly set the network information and to enable sshd in the/etc/rc.conffile. The contents of the/etc/fstabfile will be similar to the following:# Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass# /dev/mirror/swap none swap sw 0 0 /dev/mirror/root / ufs rw 1 1 /dev/mirror/usr /usr ufs rw 2 2 /dev/mirror/var /var ufs rw 2 2 /dev/cd0 /cdrom cd9660 ro,noauto 0 0
Create the
/boot/loader.conffile, with the following contents:geom_mirror_load="YES" zfs_load="YES"
Perform the following command, which will make ZFS available on the next boot:
#echo 'zfs_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.confAdd additional users to the system using the adduser(8) tool. Do not forget to add a user to the
wheelgroup so you may obtain root access after the reboot.Double-check all your settings.
The system should now be ready for the next boot. Use the reboot(8) command to reboot your system.
If your system survived the reboot, it should now be possible to log in. Welcome to the fresh FreeBSD installation, performed remotely without the use of a remote console!
The only remaining step is to configure zpool(8) and create some zfs(8) file systems. Creating and administering ZFS is very straightforward. First, create a mirrored pool:
#zpool create tank mirror /dev/ad[01]s1f
Next, create some file systems:
#zfs create tank/ports#zfs create tank/src#zfs set compression=gzip tank/ports#zfs set compression=on tank/src#zfs set mountpoint=/usr/ports tank/ports#zfs set mountpoint=/usr/src tank/src
That's all. If you are interested in more details about ZFS on FreeBSD, please refer to the ZFS section of the FreeBSD Wiki.