Remote Installation of the FreeBSD Operating System without a Remote Console

Daniel Gerzo

$FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/remote-install/article.sgml,v 1.6 2008/08/06 22:03:49 pgj Exp $

This article documents the remote installation of the FreeBSD operating system when the console of the remote system is unavailable. The main idea behind this article is the result of a collaboration with Martin Matuska with valuable input provided by Pawel Jakub Dawidek .


Table of Contents
1 Background
2 Introduction
3 Preparation - mfsBSD
4 Installation of The FreeBSD Operating System
5 ZFS

1 Background

There are many server hosting providers in the world, but very few of them are officially supporting FreeBSD. They usually provide support for a Linux® distribution to be installed on the servers they offer.

In some cases, these companies will install your preferred Linux distribution if you request it. Using this option, we will attempt to install FreeBSD. In other cases, they may offer a rescue system which would be used in an emergency. It's possible to use this for our purposes as well.

This article covers the basic installation and configuration steps required to bootstrap a remote installation of FreeBSD with RAID-1 and ZFS capabilities.