Fun with Chroot(2) in VM Land...

[Autumnlicious]

I was faced with the issue of fixing the bunk install on our local file server. In addition to it's current broken state, the previous install resided on a ridicu-fuckingly-slow SSD (solid state disk). Instead of fixing this, I thought, why not redo it entirely? And how fucking easy would it be to be able to plug in a preconfigured USB flash device and have it immediately do things.

Using VirtualBox, I created a FreeBSD virtual machine (named SHODAN) and configured it to a updated base configuration that I liked. Then, using USB passthrough, connected a usb flash drive to the VM as device da0. I put a partition table on da0, rebuilt the base system and special amd64 kernel, reinstalled the base system to the alternate root (the partitioned flash drive) and installed the etc headers.

Now I can simply chroot into the /alt root and setup the rest of the OS for where this flash drive will be deployed (File-server)... before it ever leaves my computer! There we go - insta-freebsd server on USB stick.

This is so cool.

And so damn hard to learn how to get working correct. Thank you, http://cabstand.com/usbflash.html

That crazy psycopathic bitch...

[Zen Badger]

I got "I was faced with the issue of..."

After that things got a bit hazy as my brain shorted.....

Could you rework that post into english please.

[theVOID]

Eerily reminiscent of my LFS (Linux From Scratch) install...