Best way to boot / install a mac?

[Rafal Jaworowski]

Gerald A wrote:
> On Jan 22, 2008 10:13 AM, David Frascone <frasconebulk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 1) Is there any alternative to 4-fingering the boot?  Also, why not wipe
>> all
>> partitions and boot from TFTP to get the loader?  Would that work?
>>
>> i.e. boot enet:,loader -- and then let loader somehow find the kernel /
>> filesystems on the disk?
> 
> 
> Is netbooting working on PPC? I think all new world Macs support net boot, I
> think it would be very cool to be able to use that. Comments?
> 

We have been using netbooting routinely without problems. Although there's one
particular nuisance one can encounter: in full netboot approach (i.e.
loader(8) itself is tftp'ed and kernel/world accessed over NFS) and both TFTP
and NFS support are enabled in loader(8) -- which is the default -- there
could be observed horrible delays with loading kernel, or accessing config
files for the loader(8) from an NFS server.

The reason is that loader(8) first tries to find the files on the TFTP server,
which typically isn't exporting those, and only after TFTP timeout expires
[silently], it attempts to use NFS. It can be really annoying, and a quick
workaround is disabling TFTP support in the loader(8), as typically all it
needs for the netboot is only NFS-exported kernel/world.

Rafal