Custom system building

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 14:59 +0200, Bart?omiej Rutkowski wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I  have an idea, that I need to achieve and I was wondering if I could 
> use Tinderbox to take the goals.
> Basicaly, what I need it some kind of enviroment to build custom FreeBSD 
> system, that is lean, clean and stripped (for example, no toolchains, no 
> sendmail, no gcc, no isdn, no bind and so on, all customizable) then 
> build some packages for it (like apache, mysql, postfix, all 
> customizable) on one strong and fast machine to use it for deploying on 
> several other identical machines. The point is to create build&deploy 
> system, so I could have the same system on each machine, or group of 
> machines, so I could control what packages and/or parts of base systems 
> are in each group. The deployment would by something like booting the 
> machine from fdd/cd/flash setting up nfs and then installing the 
> prebuild system to the hdd. Is it possible to make with tinderbox? Maybe 
> someone has already done that or know better solution? Maybe I could 
> achieve easily first part of the goal, that is building complete custom 
> system with packeges?

Tinderbox can absolutely do the package building for a deployment
server.  In fact, this is kind of what I do with GNOME packages.  I use
TB to build packages for the current releases of GNOME, then people all
over the world install those packages.  The Tinderbox host does not need
to have hardly any packages installed itself, especially if you use
another host for your database server.

However, the host will need to have a full world with the toolchains in
order to build the chroot jails.  I suppose if you had a static jail
src.tar, that would not be necessary, though.

As for custom builds of FreeBSD, this Tinderbox is not suited for that.
The chroot jails it builds are FULL images of a given release of
FreeBSD.  They are simply big hammers designed to make sure every port
has every possible base system thing it could need in order to build.
DES has a tinderbox in the tools module in CVS that can build FreeBSD.
I'm not sure what kind of customizations it offers, though.

Joe

-- 
PGP Key : http://www.marcuscom.com/pgp.asc
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://marcuscom.com/pipermail/tinderbox-list/attachments/20060825/84f45f00/attachment.bin