GNet Solutions » FreeBSD Administration

This is a guide on how I manually setup FreeBSD with a ZFS root on a GPT formatted hard drive using the very useful pc-sysinstall utility. This guide is intended to install FreeBSD using the installation DVD and will work offline.

• When the FreeBSD Installer Welcome message appears, choose Shell.

• Get a list of available drives:
  

  camcontrol devlist
  

• Create a pcinstall.local.cfg file:
  

  vi /tmp/pcinstall.local.cfg
  

  • And add the following:
    

    #$FreeBSD$
    # Automatic fresh install
    installInteractive=no
    installMode=fresh
    installType=FreeBSD
    
    # Local Installation Media
    installMedium=local
    localPath=/usr/freebsd-dist
    packageType=dist
    distFiles=base kernel lib32 
    pkgExt=.txz
    
    netSaveDev=AUTO-DHCP
    
    # Disk Setup for ada0
    disk0=ada0
    partition=ALL
    bootManager=none
    commitDiskPart
    
    # Partition Setup for ada0(ALL)
    disk0-part=ZFS 0 /,/usr,/var
    commitDiskLabel
    
    # Optional Components
    #installComponents=
    
    # Root Password
    rootPass=SuperSecretRootPassword
    
    # Users
    userName=bob
    userComment=Bob Guy
    userPass=SuperSecretPassword
    userShell=/bin/csh
    userHome=/home/bob
    userGroups=wheel,operator
    commitUser
    

• Run the pc-sysinstall utility with the created config file:
  

  pc-sysinstall -c /tmp/pcinstall.local.cfg
  

Resources¶

• http://web.pcbsd.org/doc-archive/10.1.2/html/advanced.html
• https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pc-sysinstall&sektion=8&n=1
• https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/tree/master/usr.sbin/pc-sysinstall/examples