1 http://phaq.phunsites.net/2006/06/25/streamline-userland-installation-on-freebsd-jails-using-sysinstall/

     2 

     3 

     4 Streamline Userland Installation On FreeBSD Jails Using SysinstallPosted

     5 by: admin  :  Category: jails

     6 There is probably a dozen of ways to install the userland for use within

     7 a FreeBSD jail.

     8 

     9 Most of the documentation I saw (including the man page itself) refers

    10 to building/installing from the source tree. Sysinstall seems only to be

    11 considered for additional post-configuration tasks and is always run

    12 inside of the jail.

    13 

    14 While building/installing a jail may have it’s advantages in respect to

    15 security flaws or bugs in general, installing through sysinstall may be

    16 faster and probably less error prone.

    17 

    18 It is in fact very easy to run sysinstall in non-interactive mode on the

    19 host itself (not inside the jail!) from a shell script, which may

    20 optionally run some post-installation tasks afterwards.

    21 By the fact that sysinstall can use the same command line arguments as

    22 if given through a configuration file, a single line could be used in

    23 your script to achieve this:

    24 

    25 # sysinstall nonInteractive=yes \

    26 _ftpPath=ftp://ftp2.ch.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD \

    27 mediaSetFTP distSetMinimum installRoot=/var/jails/192.168.0.1 \

    28 releaseName=6.1-RELEASE installCommit

    29 

    30 This line would cause sysinstall to run in non-interactive mode, useing

    31 ftp://ftp2.ch.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD as it’s download source.

    32 DistSetMinimum selects the smallest userland possible while installRoot

    33 is given to define destination directory.

    34 

    35 releaseName ist required to choose the actual release and must be set to

    36 your main release (e.g. 6.0-RELEASE, 6.1-RELEASE, etc). If you don’t set

    37 it, sysinstall will use the release name of your currently installed

    38 userland (e.g. 6.1-RELEASE-p1) and will most definitly fail because

    39 there exists no such distribution set for download.

    40 It is also possible to choose a different release like 5.5-RELEASE to be

    41 installed inside a jail. You must consider though that most tools will

    42 run expect those that interact with the kernel directly (ps, top, etc).

    43 In generall I would not recommend mixing releases expect you have a very

    44 good reason to do so.

    45 

    46 Don’t forget to add the installCommit command at the end otherwise

    47 sysinstall won’t do anything at all.

    48 

    49 By examing the sysinstall man page you will find other options to select

    50 different (or build customer) dist sets.