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Date:      Wed, 21 Sep 2005 10:05:23 +0000
From:      "kevin stovall" <kevinstovall@hotmail.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Diskless Boot Problem
Message-ID:  <BAY101-F579ED53360408764D92C6CF940@phx.gbl>
In-Reply-To: <4331077C.80005@locolomo.org>

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Yes, / is read-only and /var is rw. Here is my fstab:

192.168.0.200:/home/diskless_ro /     nfs    ro 0 0
192.168.0.200:/home/diskless_rw/var /var nfs rw 0 0
192.168.0.200:/home/diskless_rw/tmp /tmp nfs rw 0 0
192.168.0.200:/usr              /usr  nfs    rw 0 0
proc                            /proc procfs rw 0 0

I will try to get more of the terminal input tomorrow. Here is the last few 
lines

Trying to mount root from nfs:192.168.0.200:/home/diskless_ro
NFS ROOT: 192.168.0.200:/home/diskless_ro
Interface fxp0 IP-Address 192.168.0.196 Broadcast 192.168.0.255

Date

Also, I will try setting varmfs and tmpmfs to "YES" tomorrow to see if that 
works.



you should (and have?) mount / read-only, then mount /var either as a mfs or 
nfs mounted read-write. If there is no writable /var, dhclient cannot store 
the lease - this is true both in 5.x and 6.x.

If you look through /etc/rc.d/var (there is an equivalent one for tmp) you 
will see it has three modes: yes, no and auto. If set to yes, a mfs /var 
partition is created, if auto, the startup scripts will check if there is a 
writable /var, if not, then an mfs /var is created - this is default.

There are good reasons for using mfs for /tmp and /var, as well as for not: 
by using mfs you have no cleanup, and no personal data is disclosed if 
logout causes a reboot every time. However, in particular for /var there are 
data that is usefull to keep: IIRC latex stores generated fonts there.

If you have an mfs /var then the problem mentioned should not cause 
nfs-mounts to be lost because the lease is stored in the mfs. But if /var is 
an nfs mount then you may have a problem.

I sent a problem report on this, it was closed because I didn't get back on 
it. Reason is that I haven't had time to set up diskless FBSD6 environment. 
So, I'm not sure, however, if you include output from the terminal (yes I 
know it's tideus to copy), I can see if I can interpret it.





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