Create a FreeBSD 10.2 Vagrant Box File

Despite there are several Vagrant boxes available which run FreeBSD out of the box, it's good to know how to create such a box by yourself. An advantage might be, that the box comes with only those packages installed you really need. That's why I decided to create a minimal FreeBSD box with only as much packages installed to run Ansible. With Ansible installed it's quite easy to perfectly adapt the box afterwards.

Prerequisites

1. Virtualbox installed, download page

2. Vagrant installed, download page

Create a VB virtual machine

1. Create an virtual machine with NAT enabled for the first network adapter and add set the adapter type to virtio-net. Make sure the size of the configured hard disk is at least 8 GB.

2. Add the downloaded mfsBSD ISO as bootable CD device.

3. Boot.

4. Login with root and mfsroot.

5. Mount the mfsBSD ISO.

    mount_cd9660 /dev/cd0 /cdrom`
   

6. Install FreeBSD.

    zfsinstall -d /dev/ada0 -u /cdrom/10.2-RELEASE-amd64 -s 4G
   

7. Stop the VM.

8. Remove attached ISO

9. Boot the VM, login with root and execute the following commands.

   dhclient vtnet0
   fetch -o - --no-verify-peer \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JoergFiedler/freebsd-vagrant-base-box/master/update.sh \
    | sh | tee out.log
   

Note: You may use this short link instead: http://bit.ly/1lEHtrx.

10. Halt the VM.

Create the Box File

1. To create the box file just run the following command line.

    vagrant package --base my-virtual-machine
   

2. The file package.box can be refrenced by vm.box_url configuration parameter within your Vagrantfile.

Box File

FreeBSD 10.2

Download the final box file here: http://vastland.moumantai.de/FreeBSD/vagrant-box/FreeBSD-10.2-vagrant-abe25b9.box

SHA256 Checksum: abe25b9b2b934053a624632323f7c62c1fe6dce0fd7453fb484cc2aba17f4056

FreeBSD 10.1

Download the final box file here: http://vastland.moumantai.de/FreeBSD/vagrant-box/FreeBSD-10.1-vagrant-base.box

SHA256 Checksum: 67f6d3e60d26ae811b685f13ddd3683a0cc7280ac8a104203006573ea831e699

FreeBSD 10.0

Download the final box file here: http://vastland.moumantai.de/FreeBSD/vagrant-box/FreeBSD-10-vagrant-base.box

SHA256 Checksum: 3418526d3a67313d3763ac75eb5b46c2d5d90837342e9d4fdef46dc387128735

Links

1. mfsBSD: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/remote-install/preparation.html
2. mfsBSD Image: http://mfsbsd.vx.sk/
3. Vagrant Howto - Creating a Base Box: https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/virtualbox/boxes.html
4. FreeBSD VB information: https://wiki.freebsd.org/VirtualBox
5. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/39524/sharing-folder-from-windows-host-to-freebsd-guest/155373#155373

Installed Packages

pkg info

bash-4.3.42_1                  The GNU Project's Bourne Again SHell
ca_root_nss-3.21               Root certificate bundle from the Mozilla Project
gettext-runtime-0.19.6         GNU gettext runtime libraries and programs
indexinfo-0.2.4                Utility to regenerate the GNU info page index
iocage-1.7.3                   Full featured, no dependency Jail container manager
libffi-3.2.1                   Foreign Function Interface
pkg-1.6.2                      Package manager
python-2.7_2,2                 The "meta-port" for the default version of Python interpreter
python2-2_3                    The "meta-port" for version 2 of the Python interpreter
python27-2.7.11_1              Interpreted object-oriented programming language
sudo-1.8.15                    Allow others to run commands as root