Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 17:55:44 +0100 From: Joerg Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org Subject: Netbooting FBSD 9.1 from read-only medium: devices "disappear" Message-ID: <20130227165544.GG68582@uriah.heep.sax.de>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
I just tried netbooting my elderly Netra t1, in order to install a FreeBSD 9.1 straight from a CD image. The machine doesn't have a DVD drive, so netbooting was the most viable option. Since this was only intended for installation, I mounted the CD image on the netboot host through a MD device, and exported it read-only, as if it were an actual CD-ROM. The machine boots, I could newfs the filesystems, but when trying to make the /mnt/var mountpoint, I got a "read-only" filesystem even though I just mounted the newfs'ed root FS on /mnt. I umounted /mnt again, and tried to mount it again. Much to my surprise, I got a "No such file or directory". Indeed, the entire contents of /dev was gone! This is completely reproducible: netboot a 9.1 kernel, boot single-user, wait for one minute, and /dev is empty. I then extracted base.tgz from the CD image into a writable directory on the netboot host, made this directory the client's root directory, and all works fine. Still, the client mounts its NFS root directory read-only (as before), but this time, all works well. Did anyone else try to netboot directly from an installation CD-ROM (or an image thereof)? -- cheers, Joerg .-.-. --... ...-- -.. . DL8DTL http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20130227165544.GG68582>