net-booting the install disks (Re: 8.x grudges)

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 04:29:14PM -0400, Mikhail T. wrote:
> 07.07.2010 16:00, Randi Harper написав(ла):
> >So.... you're complaining that you have to modify the loader.conf? I
> >fail to see the problem. This is by design, and isn't a lack of
> >progress.
> Yes, I complain, that I have to modify a loader.conf embedded in a
> CD-image. If extracting hundreds of mega-bytes of files to make a
> one-line modification is "by design", then the design is flawed.
> Especially, when the effect achieved by the one-line modification
> can be arrived to automatically -- without such modifications.

Then don't modify loader.conf.  Instead, once the "Welcome to FreeBSD!"
portion of loader appears, press "6" to shell to the loader prompt
and type:

set vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/md0"
boot

If you want me to test/verify that this works, I can do so when I get
home in about an hour (I do have a PXE boot environment set up for
testing).

If it does work (I don't see why it wouldn't), your next question will
be "then why doesn't your doc tell me to do it that way?", which I can
answer as well:

I based a small portion of my written documentation on what others had
written.  Many of the other docs advocated doing the same, particularly
for setting serial port speed, comconsole, blah blah (because there is
no /boot.config used in this boot environment, so you can't do something
like add "-S115200 -Dh" to that file).  I chose to continue using that
nomenclature.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |