From owner-freebsd-questions Tue May 30 0:15:17 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from psasolar.colltech.com (psasolar.colltech.com [208.229.236.14]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CAC3B37B645 for ; Tue, 30 May 2000 00:15:12 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jmutter@colltech.com) Received: from localhost by psasolar.colltech.com (8.9.3/8.9.3/not) with ESMTP id CAA23065; Tue, 30 May 2000 02:15:02 -0500 (CDT) Date: Tue, 30 May 2000 02:15:01 -0500 (CDT) From: "James A. Mutter" X-Sender: jmutter@psasolar.private.psa.pencom.com To: mat@cs.mcgill.ca, gabriel_ambuehl@buz.ch Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD Diskless Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I was searching through the archives and I noticed your question about diskless booting. I too am working on a solution with PXE and Intel Pro100 cards. So far I've managed to use a combination of PXE and ISC's dhcp v3Beta to load the "pxeloader", which in turn loads a kernel over NFS, which finally mounts an NFS_ROOT partition. However, after the root partition is mounted everything goes south. If I export a copy of the BSD root filesystem (/bin /sbin /dev /var /tmp /dev /stand) from a Solaris box nothing works, the kernel complains it can't find "/sbin/init" or "/stand/sysinstall", the filesystem is export rw as "/data/bsdfs". However if I export "/" from another BSD box everything seems to work fine, this is not an acceptable solution though as I can't have multiple boxes doing read/writes on the same root fs. As I've mentioned before I'm trying to work towards a solution where I can: (a) boot "pxeloader" using PXE (b) boot customized kernel (c) run a scripted sysinstall for an automated installation. If anyone's ever user "boot net - install" and Jumpstart (Solaris Sparc) you'll know exactly what I'm working towards. I guess I just wanted to share my experience with this PXE thing and solicit any advice/experiences that others have had. If we can get this right we've taken a huge step in remote management for FreeBSD (and other Intel) servers. -- Jim To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message