From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Aug 29 20:23:30 1995 Return-Path: questions-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) id UAA05887 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 29 Aug 1995 20:23:30 -0700 Received: from oasis.txdirect.net (oasis.txdirect.net [204.57.120.34]) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) with ESMTP id UAA05881 for ; Tue, 29 Aug 1995 20:23:27 -0700 Received: (from rsnow@localhost) by oasis.txdirect.net (8.6.11/8.6.9) id WAA29874; Tue, 29 Aug 1995 22:23:19 -0500 Date: Tue, 29 Aug 1995 22:23:18 -0500 (CDT) From: Rob Snow X-Sender: rsnow@oasis To: "Question@FreeBSD.org" Subject: Booting "semi"-diskless? Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: questions-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk I'm looking for some pointers on booting some of the machines around here "semi"-diskless. The machines in question run dos and windows all day long but, they're idle in the evening. I cant go around and put root/boot partitions on them and I cant put a boot bios on the cards for obvious reasons. What I'd like to do is stroll around whistling and innocently put a floppy in them press reset, have them fire up FreeBSD. When I'm through I just halt the machine and remove the floppy. I've gathered, from TFM and some guessing that I need to do something like: on floppy ( wild ass guess ) minimum kernel with NFS (?) something to do with bootp (?) on FreeBSD box setup for as a bootp server export /usr and some SWAP space for each (?) it seems that If I put a kernel on the floppy (If I can) to boot from that this will become my root filesystem and then need /etc, etc... making things REALLY slow. The distribution boot.flp comes to mind as a possible model. (excuse the random ramblings) suggestions or pointers? or where in TFM I should look --- Rob Snow rsnow@txdirect.net