OpenBSD Journal

OpenBSD Adds Unattended Installation Support

Contributed by jcr on from the Unattended-Consequences dept.

Uwe Stühler (uwe@) has added preliminary support for unattended OpenBSD installation (think Kickstart or Cobbler) for OpenBSD.
CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	src
Changes by:	uwe@cvs.openbsd.org	2013/10/27 16:36:06

Modified files:
	distrib/miniroot: dot.profile install.sub 

Log message:
Unattended installation using DHCP and a response file

For a completely unattended installation bsd.rd has to be netbooted,
a DHCP server must be running and provide "next-server", which will be
used to fetch "http://<next-server>/install.conf".  The format of the
response file is a list of "<key> = <value>" pairs where <key> is a
substring of the interactive question (case-insensitive) and <value> is
what would be entered interactively.

Minimal response file example:

system hostname = openbsd
password for root account = <...>
network interfaces = re0
IPv4 address for re0 = dhcp
server? = <...>

This is a starting point, it still a bit rough.

ok krw@, many improvements by halex@

This is a work in progress, and as such, is neither feature-complete nor bug-free. If you think you could use this in your environment (I know I can!), then please give it a go, with the understanding that it's a bit of a moving target, and there are "More changes coming."

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (91.183.142.178) on

    That's a really great feature! Thanks!

    Comments
    1. By dgs (194.103.63.154) on

      > That's a really great feature! Thanks!

      Agree! Thanks guys!

  2. By Renaud Allard (renaud) renaud@allard.it on

    Simply excellent

  3. By Eddie (152.16.52.122) on

    Thank you guys for all of your hard work!

  4. By zdw (68.231.164.231) zdw@artisancomputer.com on http://artisancomputer.com

    This is a great start.

    On most other systems that support unattended installation, the client computer grabs a config file named something like the serial number of the machine, or the MAC address of the ethernet interface being used to network boot, then falls back to generic names. This way you can deploy whole fleets of machines easily.

    Comments
    1. By Renaud Allard (renaud) on

      > This is a great start.
      >
      > On most other systems that support unattended installation, the client computer grabs a config file named something like the serial number of the machine, or the MAC address of the ethernet interface being used to network boot, then falls back to generic names. This way you can deploy whole fleets of machines easily.

      You can still do additional customization by using siteXX.tgz

      Comments
      1. By tbert (tbert) on

        > > This is a great start.
        > >
        > > On most other systems that support unattended installation, the client computer grabs a config file named something like the serial number of the machine, or the MAC address of the ethernet interface being used to network boot, then falls back to generic names. This way you can deploy whole fleets of machines easily.
        >
        > You can still do additional customization by using siteXX.tgz

        In addition to that, this is still undergoing active development. The final solution will likely support a more sophisticated way of pushing custom configurations.

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