This section will summarize the purpose of this article and better explain what is covered herein. The instructions included in this article will benefit those using services provided by colocation facilities not supporting FreeBSD.
As we have mentioned in the Background section, many of the reputable server hosting companies provide some kind of rescue system, which is booted from their LAN and accessible over SSH. They usually provide this support in order to help their customers fix broken operating systems. As this article will explain, it is possible to install FreeBSD with the help of these rescue systems.
The next section of this article will describe how to configure, and build minimalistic FreeBSD on the local machine. That version will eventually be running on the remote machine from a ramdisk, which will allow us to install a complete FreeBSD operating system from an FTP mirror using the sysinstall utility.
The rest of this article will describe the installation procedure itself, as well as the configuration of the ZFS file system.
To continue successfully, you must:
Have a network accessible operating system with SSH access
Understand the FreeBSD installation process
Be familiar with the sysinstall(8) utility
Have the FreeBSD installation ISO image or CD handy