From owner-freebsd-small Tue Mar 28 17:18:18 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-small@freebsd.org Received: from arg1.demon.co.uk (arg1.demon.co.uk [194.222.34.166]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 46EE137BB0B for ; Tue, 28 Mar 2000 17:18:14 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from arg@arg1.demon.co.uk) Received: from localhost (arg@localhost) by arg1.demon.co.uk (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id CAA28007; Wed, 29 Mar 2000 02:17:46 +0100 (BST) (envelope-from arg@arg1.demon.co.uk) Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 02:17:42 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Gordon X-Sender: arg@server.arg.sj.co.uk To: Chris Shenton Cc: freebsd-small@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Small X? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 28 Mar 2000, Chris Shenton wrote: > How 'bout instead something that acts like an Xterminal: boot from net > (or floppy then net?), run the Xserver on the diskless box? I'd like > to have a house full of such boxes running off a decent-sized diskful > system. That way I don't have to backup or configure very much; scales > nicely. Lots of people have been doing this for years... > Any suggestion for setting this up? Get PicoBSD to do rarp and other > diskless boot operation, then get out of the way? PicoBSD isn't particularly relevant. You want in your kernel configuration: options BOOTP # Use BOOTP to obtain IP address/hostname options BOOTP_NFSROOT # NFS mount root filesystem using BOOTP info You then load this kernel, either with a boot rom (eg. ports/net/etherboot) or from floppy with the normal loader. You then need to configure your bootp or dhcp server to supply the cryptic options that specify the root and swap, and provide suitable configuration in the /etc of the root that you mount (you _can_ export the root of one of your diskful machines to be used as the discless root, but it makes the configuration more complex: easier to take a copy somewhere and export that - which can be shared between all your discless machines). There's some stuff in the handbook and elsewhere about this - the main problem is not finding a scheme that will work, more of chosing between several different but largely equivalent ways of doing it. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message