diskless and the 21st. century

[Danny Braniss]

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/