Installing FreeBSD on old dedicated servers via Linux Rescue System

Introduction

Hetzner no longer offers a FreeBSD rescue system. For dedicated servers with full UEFI support, there is a tutorial that shows how to install FreeBSD with OpenZFS from a Linux rescue system. For older servers that only have minimal UEFI support and require a legacy BIOS boot, there is another way to install FreeBSD.

Prerequisites

• The Hetzner dedicated server is booted into Linux rescue mode with SSH access working.
• IPv6 network configuration parameters

Step 1 – Download the FreeBSD distribution archive

Download base.txz and kernel.txz from FreeBSD:

curl -O http://ftp2.de.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/14.0-RELEASE/base.txz
curl -O http://ftp2.de.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/14.0-RELEASE/kernel.txz

Step 2 – Download the VM container and install mfsBSD

We use the mfsBSD virtual machine to install FreeBSD on the system drives.

Download ISO image:

curl -O https://mfsbsd.vx.sk/files/iso/14/amd64/mfsbsd-14.0-RELEASE-amd64.iso

Step 3 – Launch the mfsBSD virtual machine from the ISO image

Server disks are transferred to the VM as SCSI devices using virtio.

In the following command, replace /dev/nvme0n1 and /dev/nvme1n1 as needed:

qemu-system-x86_64 -net nic -net user,hostfwd=tcp::1022-:22 -m 2048M -enable-kvm \
-cpu host,+nx -M pc -smp 2 -vga std -k en-us \
-cdrom ./mfsbsd-14.0-RELEASE-amd64.iso \
-device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi0 \
-drive file=/dev/nvme0n1,if=none,format=raw,discard=unmap,aio=native,cache=none,id=n0 \
-device scsi-hd,drive=n0,bus=scsi0.0 \
-drive file=/dev/nvme1n1,if=none,format=raw,discard=unmap,aio=native,cache=none,id=n1 \
-device scsi-hd,drive=n1,bus=scsi0.0 \
-boot once=d -vnc 127.0.0.1:0,password=on -monitor stdio

The SSH service inside the VM is available on port 1022 of the rescue system.

Set a VNC password to allow access to VNC (optional)

To connect to VNC you need to forward port 5900 using SSH!

(qemu) set_password vnc mfsroot
(qemu) 

Step 4 – Copy the distribution files to the VM

On the Linux rescue system root shell, run the following command:

scp -o Port=1022 base.txz kernel.txz root@localhost:

The root password inside the virtual machine is mfsroot.

Step 5 – Log into the VM

Use SSH to log into the VM from a shell on the rescue system:

ssh -p 1022 root@localhost

The password is mfsroot.

Check that the drives are visible:

dmesg | grep QEMU
cd0: <QEMU QEMU DVD-ROM 2.5+> Removable CD-ROM SCSI device
da0: <QEMU QEMU HARDDISK 2.5+> Fixed Direct Access SPC-3 SCSI device
da1: <QEMU QEMU HARDDISK 2.5+> Fixed Direct Access SPC-3 SCSI device

Step 6 – Install FreeBSD

Install FreeBSD with the zfsinstall script:

zfsinstall -d /dev/da0 -d /dev/da1 -r mirror -p zroot -s 16G -u .

This will install FreeBSD on the ZFS pool zroot using RAID-1 (mirroring) on both disks with 16GB of swap space on each disk.

The installed FreeBSD root filesystem is mounted on /mnt. Since we are running the current version of FreeBSD in a VM, we can now use chroot to configure the new installation:

mount -t devfs devfs /mnt/dev
chroot /mnt

Step 7 – Configure FreeBSD

Once we have used chroot to run a shell in the installed FreeBSD environment, we can complete the configuration.

• Set a root password

passwd

• Enable root login with password

echo "PermitRootLogin yes" >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config
echo "PasswordAuthentication yes" >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config

• Set the hostname and enable sshd and our newly created autodhcpd script

Create the file /etc/rc.conf with the following content:

cat << EOF > /etc/rc.conf
zfs_enable="YES"
hostname="myhost.mydomain"
sshd_enable="YES"
EOF

Step 8 – Configure Network Settings

If your server uses a RealTec-based network card, your interface name is most likely re0. If your server uses an Intel-based network card, it is named em0 or igb0. If in doubt, use Google to find out what your NIC is called in FreeBSD.

Add the following lines to the /etc/rc.conf file:

cat <<EOF >>/etc/rc.conf
ifconfig_em0="192.168.0.2/27"
static_routes="gateway default"
route_gateway="-host 192.168.0.1 -interface em0"
route_default="default 192.168.0.1"
ifconfig_em0_ipv6="inet6 2a01:4f8:0:0::2/64"
ipv6_defaultrouter="fe80::1%em0"
EOF

Step 9 – Cleaning

Exit the chroot environment and unmount the filesystems.

exit
sync
umount /mnt/dev
umount /mnt/var
umount /mnt/tmp
umount /mnt

You can shut down the qemu virtual machine or terminate the qemu process. With everything set up, you can restart the server on your FreeBSD distribution:

reboot

Result

تبریک می گویم! شما اکنون یک نصب FreeBSD دارید که به پشتیبانی کامل UEFI نیاز ندارد.