[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI installer

[Jim Klimov]

Hello all,

   Can someone please point me (in the live image programs/files/scripts
or in the sources which make up an OI live image) where does the file
installer per se begin? I do hope that it is a separately callable
method or program (not strictly a private routine in Caiman), right? :)

   The interactive wizard we have now:
1) creates the rpool (optionally - in partitions which I've defined via
parted) by wiping the given partition and making a slice table and an
rpool with swap, dump and rpool/ROOT/openindiana datasets, and
2) then it mounts the rootfs dataset and copies files into it, and
customizes the installed image with the new admin user, password, host
name and networking info, etc.

   I would like to do the former steps myself (either manually or with
some other scripted procedure), and use only the installer (filecopying
and customization routine) on the mounted BE tree which I provide to
it. This would permit custom layouts, coexistance with old rpool info
(for upgrades of some antique systems), and so on, while the installed
OS would be functionally equivalent to one created by the dumb wizard.

   As some may know, I have earlier documented a number of approaches
for "Advanced manual installation" on the OI Wiki and in the issue
tracker (#829). This is a relatively fragile manual process which does
have its positive results, but is also easy to break (i.e. the newly
installed system might be in a remotely inaccessible state after first
boot due to some typo). So far the most reliable way was to let the
existing installer do its job, reboot, and then create the layout I
want in nearby datasets and rsync over the (customized) BE filesystems
into the new tree. This method works but is not optimal for a number
of cases (restricted space, desire to keep old rpool data, several
reboots for the setup, etc.) I do hope to either automate my approach
with scripts and/or expand the installer to use the provided rootfs
instead of wiping the disk, and to make the process automated and
repeatable with the interactive installation wizard(s).

   Also, I'm going over my notes to see how it applies to a recent OI
(151a8) and found there are some discrepancies in the set of services
enabled and working in the newly installed OS with automated and manual
approaches, for example... and I can't easily find what I am doing
*that* much differently by hand. There are indeed discrepancies with
permissions on some /devices/* for example, and maybe with RBAC so
that some services can't open some device nodes or real files ;-\

Thanks for any pointers,
//Jim Klimov