PC-BSD install without a bootable DVD

Recently, I tried to get PC-BSD onto an older system. This system didn't support booting off of USB, nor did it support swapping in a DVD player for the CD player that was shipped with the system. The computer seemed to be fast enough to support PC-BSD. Since all I really wanted was something that could play some games that my 4-year-old wanted, I wasn't willing to spend a ton of money on a new computer just yet. Better to wait a year or two until we really needed something better.

PC-BSD only installing off a memory stick or off a DVD these days. I opted to go the DVD route because this computer didn't support booting off USB media as far as I could tell (I tried it on two machines: an old HP eVectra 933MHz box, and a slightly newer Dell Optiplex GX270).

The summary of this hack is 'Copy all the files from /boot on the ISO image onto a hard disk that has been made bootable and use a USB expansion box to store the real DVD'.

First, I needed to create a bootable hard disk. I put the hard disk that was going to be installed into the system info a USB expansion box and plugged it into my FreeBSD system. This gave me a disk as 'da0'. This disk had an old Windows installation on it. All commands are run as root. You are advised to triple check your typing, as transposed letters and such might have adverse effects.

Relabeling the Disk

Since I had an old windows install on the disk, I just needed to delete the old windows partition and create a FreeBSD one.

1. gpart delete -i 1 da0
2. gpart add -t \!165 da0
3. gpart create -s bsd da0s1
4. gpart add -t \!7 da0s1

Did the trick. Your milage may vary at this stage. I've also used "gpart delete -i X da0" and "gpart destroy da0" to totally wipe a GPT scheme off the disk in the past. If you do that, you'll also need "gpart create -s mbr da0" before proceeding to step 2 above. There's lots of other ways to skin this cat too involving dd, but since gpart has been added to the system, its so easy to use I prefer it for quick tasks like this so I don't have to remember "do I need to blank the front of the disk, or the end of the disk..."

Making the disk bootable

Next we need to make the disk bootable. This is a lot easier than it used to be in days of yore:

1. gpart bootcode -b /boot/boot0 da0
2. gpart bootcode -b /boot/boot da0s1

We have to make it bootable twice due to the multi-stage boot-loader that FreeBSD has (other systems are likely similar). "boot0" just prompts for which partition to boot (doing the first one by default). "boot" will then load /boot/loader to finish out the booting process and hand control over to FreeBSD's kernel.

Copying The Files

The pc-bsd installer for the DVD just loads a ram disk, and then runs off that. All the early stages of the boot loader need are contained in /boot. This includes the kernel, the third stage boot loader and various config files and scripts. So the next steps are to copy these files from the cd onto the bootable hard disk we just made. This assumes that the mdconfig command below prints "md0" for unit 0. If it prints anything else, you'll need to adjust accordingly. Also, if you are reading this in the future, you may need to change the PCBSD iso name.

1. newfs /dev/da0s1a
2. mount /dev/da0s1a /mnt
3. mdconfig -f PCBSD8.1-x86-DVD.iso
4. mount -t cd9660 /dev/md0 /cdrom
5. mkdir /mnt/boot
6. cd /cdrom/boot
7. tar cf - . | (cd /mnt/boot; tar xvf -)
8. cd /
9. umount /mnt
10. umount /cdrom
11. mdconfig -d -u 0

Moving the disk

At this point, I had to unplug the USB expander from the first system, remove the hard drive and install it into my target box. I also grabbed my UBS DVD player and connected it to the box with a copy of the DVD I burned from the above file. I selected hard disk as the boot media in the bios and let the system boot. It booted off the hard disk, but then started looking for the proper cd device. Luckily for me, it found the DVD on cd1 instead of cd0 (which is what was built-in to the Dell I was booting off of). It then became a 'normal' PC-BSD installation, which is described in detail elsewhere.

Hopefully, people find these instructions useful. Since I only had one of these systems, I didn't create any kind of script to make it easier. Sorry.

[[ Updated to fix problem noted in the comments ]]

FreeNAS 8 -- Update

If you are following the commit messages to FreeNAS, you'll already know that FreeNAS 8 is shaping up nicely. If not, allow me to summarize some of the progress here.

In the past two weeks we've managed to break the gui completely, and put it back together. In the process, we've moved from a fairly static system to a more dynamic DOJO driven system that's much easier to use. It is less cluttered, while still providing escape hatches to the more complicated stuff. In addtion, we've written an installer (really, used the installer from PC-BSD, now part of FreeBSD-current). We've upgraded all the ports to FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE (basically about 6 weeks newer ports). We'll need to do security updates before beta on some of these as well, so we've added the ability to patch the ports tree (which should also mean we'll retain much of the flexibility that the legacy FreeNAS system has wrt upgrades).

All of this is building to a new alpha snapshot. We're nearing the feature complete phase and want to get at least one more alpha out the door before we go to beta, most likely early next month. Watch this space for updates.

If you've been trying to follow the process at a source code basis, you may have run into a problem. While the build system does a good job at applying new patches to FreeBSD's src and ports tree, it doesn't do a very good job when the patch has been updated. Its unclear to me what the best way to manage this process is, since it can be hard to manage a new ports tree, new src and ports patches, as well as preserve the '-b' functionality of nanobsd which allows for fast builds after an initial build.

So, if you encounter problems updating your tree from an earlier snapshot, there's an easy work around. If you define 'force_update=1' in your environment, then you'll force the do_build.sh script to update your src and ports trees (it is needed if you have a June 24th ports tree from before the cut over). This will force csup to run, which 'fixes' all the files that have been patched. I've enhanced do_build.sh so that it will force all the patches to be reapplied when you do this. It is best to avoid the -n and -b flags to do_build.sh when doing this, since you really want a fresh build after the latest series of changes.

Later this week, we'll have another alpha snapshot ready. The last bit of GUI work should be done tomorrow (we need to add back the ability to control sharing/exporting of volumes which was lost in the great GUI reshuffle). We'll also need to test it to make sure the basics work and then we'll put binaries up to share. The installer may even be ready too, so that might also include ISO images you can boot and use to install the images into a CF.

Finally, we've reworked Olivier Cochard-Labbé's to nanobsd for device label support to be more flexible. As a result, they are now in both FreeNAS, as well as in FreeBSD. The practical upshot is that now a single image can boot off CF (where the root device is /dev/ad0s1a), a VirtualBox container (where it might be /dev/ada0s1a or /dev/ad0s1a) or a USB Stick/VMWare container (where it would be /dev/da0s1a). This should solve some difficulty people reported using VMWare in the first alpha, as well as provide a nice, flexible system to have a single image for all media types going forward. Briefly, we can label things within NanoBSD so they appear as /dev/ufs/FreeNASs1a so that the root filesystem can be found on any underlying media. If you're interested in the details of this, check out glabel and the -L option to tunefs and newfs.

As always, we welcome feedback. We'll have something in place soon to help collect and organize the feedback from the beta tests. I'll announce it after we go live.

My BSDTalk Interview

I just gave Will Backman over at BSDTalk an interview on FreeNAS 8, NanoBSD, ZFS and embedding FreeBSD. You can check it out at the BSDtalk blog. Hope you all enjoy.

Another FreeNAS Alpha snapshot is slated for early this week. Stay tuned. It will include a revamped user interface, local user support, FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE ports and a few other goodies.

FreeNAS 8 -- First alpha snapshots

My blog has been somewhat quiet lately. I've been busy with other things lately.

The biggest of the other things is FreeNAS. iXsystems stepped up to the plate late last year when FreeNAS was going to become a Linux based platform.

The iXsystems engineering team has moderized FreeNAS in a number of ways. We wanted a platform that was more extensible than the current m0m0wall-based framework allowed. We wanted to create a platform that could be expandable by modules (possibly not even written by us). We wanted to make it easier to upgrade the base FreeBSD release, as well as leverage more base FreeBSD technology that has been integrated into the system since FreeNAS was originally developed.

We've migrated the build to be NanoBSD based. This allows us to leverage the embedded work that has gone into NanoBSD. It also allows us to push some of the features that are important to FreeNAS back into the base FreeBSD distribution. NanoBSD gives us the flexibility that we need. Since we're using the FreeBSD package system to add ports and packages, users will be able to add their own packages (we'll likely expand the basics to use the PBI's that PC-BSD produces for ease of installation). We're using the normal rc.d system, so upgrading is easier as well.

On the GUI side we've moved to using django. This is a python-based front-end to sqlite3 which is extensible and easy to use. While we've kept things rather plain so far, we plan on jazzing things up a bit now that we have the basics working fairly well. Since the GUI is based on django, we'll be able to allow packages to hook into the GUI to present a united interface to the user.

The GUI calls into a middleware layer that manages the services on the box. This middleware is responsible for generating updated config files, as well as starting, stopping and restarting daemons on the system. The same code generates the files at boot as well. Having all the configuration data in one database makes it easier to upgrade from release to release, since you don't have to merge your changes into the config files: the system takes care of that details.

If you'd like to read about the nuts and bolts about trying out the latest snapshot, you can check out my forum post on the topic over at the FreeNAS forums.