Unattended install of OpenBSD

Goals

We are trying to implement unattended install in OpenBSD in time for 3.7 3.8 3.9 in a manner that is usable in many situations. The patch below was found to be not entirely in the style of OpenBSD so we wanted to start over, but real life has reared its ugly head.

To be useful in a situation with dedicated technical staff running hundreds of servers, the method must support booting a custom bsd.rd (via CD or PXE) containing the 'unattended.conf' file. It's not clear how to allow for easy management of unattended.conf files for hundreds of hosts, especially if the local site already has some type of infrastructure for configuration management.

To be useful in the case of a novice with only one or very few systems, it should be possible to boot the install kernel from an existing partition, CD or PXE and supply a remote unattended.conf (via disk, ftp, http, nfs, afs, etc) without the need for customized boot media.

This latter case would also make it very easy for new users, as a few sane unattended config files could be provided on the install media and ftp servers.

1. Get the latest patch, and apply it.
   $ ftp http://mongers.org/pub/openbsd/patches/3.6/unattended-5.patch
$ cd /usr/src
$ sudo patch -p0 < ~/unattended-X.patch
2. Build your own floppyXY.fs and write it to a floppy.
   $ cd /usr/src/distrib/${ARCH}/ramdiskA/ && sudo make
3. Sit back and watch as your system installs itself.

Notes

• We only have access to i386, amd64, macppc and sparc hardware. The machine dependent install.md and list files for other archs have been changed as well, but they need testing.
• Questions that are not answered in unattended.conf will use the default value when one is suggested by the install script. For systems with only one disk, one nic, etc., this results in a very short config file.

Progress

Starting over.