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Date:      Thu, 27 Nov 2008 18:37:12 -0600
From:      Kevin Day <kevin@your.org>
To:        "Garrett Cooper" <yanefbsd@gmail.com>
Cc:        =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=F8rgrav?= <des@des.no>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD boot menu is missing
Message-ID:  <CAD1D4FA-7629-4F46-8F9B-6E8C7BF5309A@your.org>
In-Reply-To: <7d6fde3d0811271230p512d1325i591e9711caa432d8@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <2ACA3DE8F9758A48B8BE2C7A847F91F240CE6B@polaris.maxiscale.com> <2ACA3DE8F9758A48B8BE2C7A847F91F240CE99@polaris.maxiscale.com> <20081126190545.17b79195@bhuda.mired.org> <2ACA3DE8F9758A48B8BE2C7A847F91F240CEB4@polaris.maxiscale.com> <861vwx4fd5.fsf@ds4.des.no> <2ACA3DE8F9758A48B8BE2C7A847F91F240CEBF@polaris.maxiscale.com> <86myfl15cl.fsf@ds4.des.no> <2ACA3DE8F9758A48B8BE2C7A847F91F240CEC4@polaris.maxiscale.com> <86wsepymw0.fsf@ds4.des.no> <AB85B81E-878E-4F91-B494-456E2FDC36D1@your.org> <7d6fde3d0811271230p512d1325i591e9711caa432d8@mail.gmail.com>

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On Nov 27, 2008, at 2:30 PM, Garrett Cooper wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Kevin Day <kevin@your.org> wrote:
>> Just in case anyone needs a real step-by-step guide to getting a  
>> diskless
>> PXE/NFS boot going, I wrote this up a little while ago.
>>
>> http://sigsegv.org/wiki/How_to_do_a_PXE_netboot_install_of_FreeBSD
>>
>> The existing documentation was either a bit out of date, glossed  
>> over some
>> of it or just flat out didn't work for me. Takes an existing  
>> running system,
>> clones it into /nfsroot, enables dhcpd/tftpd/nfsd, and relies on  
>> rc.diskless
>> to make the magic happen after boot.
>
> That's a good brief guide, but a lot of the information is already
> contained in: <http://people.freebsd.org/~alfred/pxe/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/pxe/article.html 
> >.
>
> That reminds me that I need to add some documentation for booting
> OpenFirmware Mac's with Netboot (some experiences that I had at Cisco
> that I wanted to pass down for others).


Saying this carefully so I don't sound like I'm volunteering to update  
a bunch of docs... :)

The problems I encountered with that PXE guide is:

* It's now 5 floppies instead of 2 to get sysinstall going. The PXE  
loader can't handle this (keeps prompting you for the next floppy).  
Alfred's changes to loader.rc don't work anymore.
* The loader has problems with launching gzipped kernels brought over  
PXE for some reason. I dunno when this started.
* vnconfig is now mdconfig
* His guide was just to get sysinstall running, not end up with a  
usable diskless workstation.
* It doesn't mention the dhcp option "root-path", which was where I  
kept getting stuck.

It worked flawlessly when 4.0 was -CURRENT, but it's a bit out of date  
in a few places.





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