Boot from CD

[Andrea Brancatelli]

Hello everybody.

 

I'm working on a thing I never tried before. I did some googling but I don't
think I haven't found any correlated to this.

 

The situation is pretty simple: I'm configuring a FreeBSD (6.1) server to
boot from a SAN thru a QLogic 2340 Fiber Channel card. This in general is
not a problem as I already have another working machine with this solution. 

 

Now for a couple of reason not related to FreeBSD this new machine won't yet
_boot_ from the SAN itself but at the same time have all the system
installed on the SAN. What I need to do is have a boot device that loads the
bootsector, the kernel and then starts everything else from the disk in SAN.

 

I thought about accomplishing this with a BOOT-CD that starts up the kernel
and then from the fstab loads the /, /etc, /usr and so on from the SAN.

 

Now my question is this: how do the kernel know where to search the fstab
(considered that the fstab says where to find the /etc)? I mean: I suppose I
have to put on the CDROM an exact /etc/fstab for that installation.? Or this
could be avoided? Also because I may need to edit the fstab for the machine
without having to reburn the CD. so what? Or maybe the kernel can actually
just be read from the CD and then everything else from the ( SAN | local )
drive? Am I missing something?

 

I'm yet in the make buildworld buildkernel stage so maybe when making the
make distribution to create the ISO everything will appear clearer to me but
right now something it's not really clear.

 

I hope the scenario is clear.

 

Any suggestion? Any link to any kind of documentation?

 

Thank you very much.

 

Andrea