FreeBSD : ISO to VM in minutes (vagrant + veewee)

This site has been dead for a long time now, but I'm working on a couple of cool projects and figured I'd revive it and get the information sharing going again.

I had the opportunity to go to the #devopsdays Boston conference last week.
While I was there I meet a lot of smart techies, learned a lot, and even gave an ignite talk.

I had the opportunity to see a talk on vagrant.
Surprisingly it was the first time i had heard of it and if you haven't heard of it, I recommend checking it out.

So as if vagrant wasn't cool enough, one of the guys there was working on a plugin to vagrant called veewee which allows you to create a bare virtual machine install from an iso! They had created a bunch of definition files for creating virtual machines from different linux distros, but hadn't been able to get a FreeBSD virtual machine crafted from scratch. Luckily for them (and for me :) ) i had put "I <# FreeBSD" in my slide deck and they noticed.

So i took up the challenge of getting a FreeBSD definition written to build a virtualbox VM from iso to installed.

I thought it would be a piece of cake based on my experience with the sysinstall (the bsd installer that i could run through in my sleep at this point) and years of installing FreeBSB.

Unfortunately sysinstall was not meant to be since it's automated installation is a little kludge and would have been a lot of scripting prior to installation.
I opted to use a different installer for this. The team over at PC-BSD have a very sweet BSD installer which luckily for me gives you the option to install PC-BSD or FreeBSD. So i set out to get FreeBSD working with veewee. Little did I know of all the head banging and late nights that I was in for.

I'm on night three and i have stage 1 of 3 done.
Stage 1 : Install OS
Stage 2 : post install, pre-reboot script
Stage 3 : post install, on first boot script

So stage one is done! I have a definition that allows veewee to build a FreeBSD installation from an iso.
You can see the gist entry here until they get a chance to merge it into veewee (which should be soon, they are actively working on the project which is great!).

I'll be working on Stage 2 and Stage 3 over the next couple of nights to see if I can't get puppet and chef all setup on the vm after first reboot.
This will help them add to their available templates and should help with a couple of projects brewing at the office.