[Bug 213175] [handbook] Precisions/caveat for 30.8 Diskless Operation

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https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=213175

            Bug ID: 213175
           Summary: [handbook] Precisions/caveat for 30.8 Diskless
                    Operation
           Product: Documentation
           Version: Latest
          Hardware: Any
                OS: Any
            Status: New
          Severity: Affects Only Me
          Priority: ---
         Component: Documentation
          Assignee: freebsd-doc at FreeBSD.org
          Reporter: natbsd at instinctive.eu

Hello,

a few days ago I found myself exactly in the situation solved by the Handbook
in chapter 30.8 "Diskless Operation with PXE". I'm as impressed as usual with
the quality and efficiency of FreeBSD documentation, which made the few
slightly-harder points stand out. I'm proposing to help fix these points. I
think I will try to submit a patch in a few days, but there could be some
helpful discussion prior to making it, so I'm submitting the bug without a
patch for now.

In case it matters, my situation is that I've been trying to build a silent
desktop, in the idea of "NUC" or "nettops", with a fanless low-power CPU, a
fanless power unit, and something other than a hard drive for the OS. It seems
to get a bit hot in there though (~50°C on the cores) so I'm a bit afraid to
burn my SSD, so I decided to try a diskless operation, by having the OS on a
NAS in another room. I don't know yet how to deal with /home, as an
unauthenticated read-write NFS makes me a bit uneasy even on a wired LAN.

The first issue I encountered is in paragraph 30.8.1 "Setting Up the PXE
Environment", at step 14. I installed some packages in the root served over
NFS. With pkg-ng, that means updating the repository and (by default) keeping a
copy of the packages. That made my /var over 130MB. Proceeding to make
conf/base/var.cpio.gz, I didn't realize that /var would end-up in a 5MB mfs,
which causes enough problems to prevent booting altogether.

I would suggest at least mentioning conf/base/var/md_size around the end of
30.8.1

The second issue I encountered is in the same paragraph, step 3 (but it
manifests after having solved the previous one. I don't know enough of NFS to
be sure of what is going on, but it seems `-maproot=root` is needed to have a
working system. The symptoms were weird, like the mfs still being at 5 MB (but
the system boots completely), and not having the permission to run
/sbin/shutdown. If I hadn't read diskless(8), which mentions `-maproot=0`, and
hadn't thought it weird root not having some execute permission, I might still
be scratching my head on this.

Lastly, I used 10.3-RELEASE .txz archives instead of make
buildworld/buildkernel/installworld/installkernel/distribution, but I'm not
sure whether it's worth talking about this alternative in the handbook.

Hoping this helps,
Natasha

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