Comments on: FreeBSD 6.0 install woes

By: mark

mark — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 05:34:42 +0000

Jim: What I meant by “just” is that’s it’s a VERY typical, run-of-the-mill config. And of course ATA is consumer grade elecronics — this is a desktop box! Putting SCSI in it would be rediculous.

And anyways, as I indicated in the main post, the problem is a bug in the installer using the mini-root ISO to install over the network. It’s not an ATA issue.

By: mark

mark — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 05:32:05 +0000

Oh, BTW Chris, I’ve found YUM to be a life saver on Red Hat systems. I don’t know how anyone lives without it. It might not be as solid as dpkg/apt, but it goes a long way towards eliminating dependency hell.

We basically sit yum between our machines and the Red Hat Network. That way we can fine tune what updates / packages come from Red Hat proper vs. what packages we provide ourselves. So far we haven’t hit any glitches with the process, and we keep several hundred machines up to date with this approach.

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 02:08:35 +0000

“Just a 80GB Seagate PATA drive off an Intel ICH4 ATA controller”

I consider ATA to be consumer grade electronics, so this is what I would try changing first. Try SCSI to rule out the rest of the hardare.

The “Just” seems to indicate that you suspect it as well.

By: mark

mark — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 08:58:48 +0000

Thanks for the links Joseph. I knew of the BSD Installer and it looks promising, especially now that both DragonFly and pfSense are using it. Maybe it will see its way into FreeBSD soon.

I didn’t know about FreeBSD Binary Update.

By: Chris Adams

Chris Adams — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 02:11:04 +0000

I ultimately bailed on FreeBSD over the ports/patch issue. When you have close to a hundred machines to manage the degree of manual admin overhead becomes the overriding issue. Debian was such a huge time-saver that the [increasingly debatable] advantage of the FreeBSD kernel was almost irrelevant (RedHat and SuSE failed the same test - pay a LOT more for more manual intervention and downtime).

And yes, the installer’s a major drawback. With our Debian infrastructure it takes 20 minutes from the first boot to having a fully-operational developer workstation ready to deploy; FreeBSD tended to be at least a day, even for the resident FreeBSD partisan.

By: Joseph Scott

Joseph Scott — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:55:35 +0000

There are some other options. FreeBSD Binary Update might take the place of your make world woes.

As for the installer, there was a Google Summer of Code 2005 FreeBSD project to include the BSD Installer as a replacement for sysinstall. I know the builds of FreeBSD were being generated with this installer in place, although I haven’t looked lately to see where things are at.

FreeBSD isn’t perfect, but it has served me well for many years, especially for remote servers.

By: mark

mark — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:15:54 +0000

Yeah, I’ve been a long time FreeBSD supporter, but whenever someone says “but buildworld rocks, man!” I respond with a “dude, if you think it’s a-ok to rebuild the __entire fucking operating system__ just because there’s a security patch for libz, well, you’re nuts.”.

I’m gathering by your comment that this is still the case with FreeBSD today. Hmm. Still, I think I’ll try and get it going and see how other aspects of the system have changed/improved.

By: Saint Aardvark

Saint Aardvark — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:04:28 +0000

“split personality of base and ports”…man, that’s the best description of what bugs me, deep down, about FreeBSD that I’ve ever heard. I love FreeBSD except when it comes time to upgrade…then the hell begins.

As for the installer: haven’t come across the problems you had, but I can vouch for the bugs that are in the code that’s meant to allow for automated installs. Between that and the ambiguous documentation, it’s a serious amount of work to try and automate installs.