bsdinstall script fails when run from Packer

[firsttiger]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to use Packer to build an AWS AMI of FreeBSD 13.2 with the root filesystem on an ZFS mirror.

I've tried using both a bsdinstall script and a shell script which invokes the individual bsdinstall commands in sequence. In both cases, the Packer shell provisioner detects an error during bsdinstall distextract and aborts the build.

However, if I log into the running source instance over ssh and run the bsdinstall script or the shell script manually, everything works as expected.

I suspect there might an odd interaction between dialog and the Packer shell provisioner, or perhaps something odd in the ssh session that Packer uses, but I don't know where to start looking for further clues...

Any ideas?

Is there an option to turn off the use of dialog somehow?

With thanks,

Jarvis

 

[acheron]

Can you share your bsinstall script ? I deploy VM on my esxi with packer and have no problem.

 

[firsttiger]

Can you share your bsinstall script ? I deploy VM on my esxi with packer and have no problem.

export BSDINSTALL_DISTSITE='https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/arm64/13.2-RELEASE/'                                                                              
export ZFSBOOT_VDEV_TYPE=mirror                                                  
export ZFSBOOT_DISKS="nda1 nda2"                                                  
export ZFSBOOT_SWAP_SIZE="1G"                                                    
export nonInteractive="YES"                                                      
                                                                                 
DISTRIBUTIONS='kernel.txz base.txz'                                              
                                                                                 
#!/bin/sh                                                                        
freebsd-update --not-running-from-cron fetch                                      
freebsd-update --not-running-from-cron install                                    
                                                                                 
pkg install --yes ec2-scripts ebsnvme-id                                          
                                                                                 
sysrc ec2_configinit_enable=YES                                                  
sysrc ec2_fetchkey_enable=YES                                                    
sysrc ec2_loghostkey_enable=YES                                                  
sysrc ntpd_enable=YES                                                            
sysrc dev_aws_disk_enable=YES                                                    
sysrc growfs_enable="YES"                                                        
sysrc ifconfig_DEFAULT="SYNCDHCP accept_rtadv"                                    
sysrc sshd_enable="YES"                                                          
sysrc ipv6_activate_all_interfaces="YES"                                          
sysrc rtsold_enable="YES"                                                        
sysrc rtsold_flags="-M /usr/local/libexec/rtsold-M -a"                            
                                                                                 
touch /firstboot

 

[firsttiger]

Thanks for the help so far! I've found that adding ssh_pty = true to the Packer build configuration seems to allow bsdinstall to get further...