Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:33:24 +0200 From: Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il> To: FreeBSD-Hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: diskless and the 21st. century Message-ID: <E1J5fC0-000Jd3-4G@cs1.cs.huji.ac.il>
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Hi, Being a great fan of diskless/dataless hosts, I'm always looking for ways to reduce the administration 'overhead'. One issue is the number of different /(root) needed - one for each platform/os-version at least. Another issue is the particular configuration of a host, most of it can be done via rc.conf, but some need to be configured before init(8) gets run - boot/device.hits, boot/loader.conf. Since this are in the disk image, which is shared among many, they are difficult to 'personalize'. One solution, of cource, is to make several copies of the root image, one for each host. Another is to use DHCP, and with a patch to bootp.c(*) makes pxeboot(8) put most of the configurable options in the kernel env. Why all this blaber? well, I need someone with forth knowledge to fix the loader(8), if a variable is already in the kernel environment, don't override. The current problem I'm faced with, is that newer servers have newer/wierd ilo/imap/serial setups, Sun Fire X2200 have the serial console configured to com2, so adding 'hint.sio.1.flags="0x10" made the console available. But as soon as another host - without sio.1 - booted from that image it panicked. So now, I can configure hints. via dhcp. cheers, danny (*): availabel from ftp://ftp.cs.huji.ac.il/users/danny/freebsd/diskless-boot/
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