netboot with serial?

Dick Davies rasputnik at hellooperator.net
Tue Apr 13 09:29:07 PDT 2004


Hi, this is probably doable but I'm stumped.

I have a M6000 mini-itx box with a 20Gb drive and no cdrom,  monitor
or keyboard, and a NetBSD box running NFS.

What I want to do is PXEboot the 6000 off the NetBSD box into
FreeBSD (it has usb2 and firewire ports which are shaky at best
under NetBSD).

What I want really is to kick off a serial port install, and then
install over NFS.

I found 

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/pxe/article.html

which is 90% of what I need, but doesn't do the serial bit.

The steps as I understand it would be:

6000 boots pxe,
gets a path to pxeboot and a nfs root directory via dhcp,
mounts the root,
grabs a (install) kernel
the install starts as normal.

On NetBSD you just have an serial port aware pxeboot, how do you
guys do it?
-- 
If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake
him up.
Rasputin :: Jack of All Trades - Master of Nuns


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