FreeBSD boot menu is missing

[Kevin Day]

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

> On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Kevin Day <kevin at 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 The existing documentation was either a bit out of date, glossed  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It worked flawlessly when 4.0 was -CURRENT, but it's a bit out of date  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.