# Best tool for unattended installs?



## MMacD (Aug 13, 2019)

I have a few dev systems on a lan that I fit out almost identically with xorg, xfce, mariadb, php, apache, and other subsystems, apps, and utilities so that I can assign the boxes different roles ad libitum  (zfs is the only exception:  I activate that only on my server-of-all-work). 

For some reason, I've never been able to successfully update to a new version of the o/s.  I always try, but something always breaks and I end up reinstalling everything from the metal up.  But re-installing everything by hand even on one system is a pain in the dupa, so I'd like to automate it.  I already know that I don't want to use poudriere for that purpose.  Is there another tool that's obviously the best choice for what I want to do?


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## SirDice (Aug 13, 2019)

MMacD said:


> But re-installing everything by hand even on one system is a pain in the dupa, so I'd like to automate it.


Ansible and Puppet are two popular choices. Puppet has quite a steep learning curve and is really meant to automate managing hundreds of servers. Ansible is a little easier to get started with. 



MMacD said:


> I already know that I don't want to use poudriere for that purpose.


It's not meant to be used to automate installation. It automates the creation of your package repositories.


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## jallen (Aug 14, 2019)

Ansible might be a bit overkill for this use case. From my understanding, it's really good for automating tasks on a repeating basis, more complicated sequences--larger scale things. You can script an installation with an /etc/installerconfig file (see https://www.sysadminnotes.ca/worknotes/automated-freebsd-installations.html). From there you would still need to cart the iso around on a usb stick or something, but if you want to truly automate installing all the systems at once, I think you'd need something like a pxe boot server to distribute the iso over your LAN. If you were to use Ansible or the like, I'm fairly certain you would still need to set up the aforementioned infrastructure in order to run automated installs with it.


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## Phishfry (Aug 14, 2019)

I was going to link that page above but he doesn't show how to pre-load packages.

The FreeBSD release(7) system has potential. But needs customizing. 
I copied /usr/src/release to /usr/src/custom and build custom VM images that way.
For packages the DVD version of the installer/release has packages included.
I am sure you could modify that mechanism to add you own.
But much of the above website settings handle what needs adding..


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## CraigHB (Aug 15, 2019)

Have you seen this thread?  https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/installing-freebsd-manually-no-installer.63201

If you overlay your config files and fire off some pkg commands from the install script you can end up with a fully working system ready to use in just a few minutes.  I actually keep a local package repository.  Though I don't know how that would apply for building from source, that's just for a bootstrap installation with packages.


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