(auto)Installing BSD Systems  by Vinícius Zavam
Channel: EuroBSDcon
Date: 2021-09-27

After more than a decade in touch with systems like FreeBSD, not by just consuming them as an end-user but also by working as a sysadmin or by developing ‘BSD Powered’ solutions, you might fall into pitfalls by not easily finding a way to fully automate their installations. The good news: it’s possible and it’s not as complicated as you might think!

Today’s needs regarding automating things like an O.S. installation can save you a lot of time; Kickstart or Preseed files are not the only ways of doing it. One can even combine or expand it all to add patching and updating routines into the game.

Here we are not talking about a one-click solution or something like querying an API endpoint to provide you with a shiny virtual machine; no. The main idea behind this talk is to present you with a tool-set and ways of (auto)installing your machines, let’s say, using a NetBSD operating system; be it virtual, or not.

Inspired by talks like the ones showing how OpenBSD Amsterdam sets its virtual machines up, we get together and share thoughts, ideas and setups to get DHCP, iPXE and diskless systems in our favor to set our infrastructure up and running.

Concerned about the first boot and keeping up with services’ configurations and consistencies, we also talk about getting Puppet to watch it for you. Considering plain text passwords no one wishes to host in a Git repository, EYAML to the rescue!

Vinícius Zavam
FreeBSD ports committer, TorBSD Diversity Project (TDP) proud contributor and Core Team member of the Tor Project.
https://keybase.io/egypcio