Is there a nice diskless HOWTO?
Bruce O'Neel
edoneel at sdf.lonestar.org
Thu Oct 20 08:38:40 PDT 2005
Hi,
Thanks again. These instructions were enought to get things running.
A bit of a pain that locking doesn't work though :-) Guess I won't
be changing the password without booting from a disk though...
Thanks.
cheers
bruce
On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 07:18:58PM -0400, Miles Nordin wrote:
> >>>>> "bo" == Bruce O'Neel <edoneel at sdf.lonestar.org> writes:
>
> bo> Hi, Is there a nice diskless HOWTO?
>
> AFAICT no.
>
> I believe you can install by hand just as on NetBSD, except while for
> NetBSD you just extract the .tgz files, for FreeBSD you have to cat
> together the blah.a{b,c,d,e,f} chunks, and then pipe that into gzip |
> pax -rpe. or is it bunzip2, i forget.
>
> The three significant differences I found between FreeBSD and NetBSD
> nfsroots are:
>
> * On NetBSD, the 'option root-path' option is a path only, not a
> server IP, and the IP address of the root NFS server if it differs
> from the 'next-server' goes into the 'option swap-server' field.
> NetBSD doesn't document this, but that's how it is. On FreeBSD,
> the root-path option is "1.2.3.4:/path/to/root" as you'd expect.
>
> * FreeBSD is broken all over the place if the NFS server doesn't
> support locking. like, 'vi' doesn't work for example. and AFAICT
> it is impossible to disable the default locking-enabled mount
> options of an NFS root. NetBSD doesn't use locking anywhere---I
> think there is no working NetBSD code written for NFS locking,
> client or server.
>
> * NetBSD NFSroot users like to make mfs's and tmpfs's for things like
> /dev, /tmp, /var/run. FreeBSD doesn't have mount_mfs---it uses
> something else. I couldn't get FreeBSD's mdmfs to work at all, but
> FreeBSD has a devfs so it's good there's no incentive to make a
> /dev mfs as on NetBSD.
>
> -----8<-----
> >>>>> "jg" == John-Mark Gurney <gurney_j at resnet.uoregon.edu> writes:
> >>>>> "kk" == Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> writes:
> >>>>> "rw" == Royce Williams <royce at alaska.net> writes:
> >>>>> "a" == alm <alm at sirius.net.au> writes:
>
> jg> http://people.freebsd.org/~murray/sparc64/install.html
> kk> Here's a snippet from my dhcpd.conf
> rw> http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200301/sparc64-nfsroot.html
> a> -Configure a static DHCP lease for it:
> a> host netboot {
> a> hardware ethernet <mac-addr> ;
> a> option host-name "<hostname>" ;
> a> fixed-address <IP addr.> ;
> a> always-reply-rfc1048 on;
> a> filename "/boot/loader";
> a> next-server <TFTP/NFS server> ;
> a> option root-path "<TFTP/NFS server>:/mnt" ;
> a> }
>
> It turned out to be pretty easy just to get the system booted once
> hearing that /boot/loader could be fed straight to OpenPROM over tftp.
>
> This:
>
> a> boot net:dhcp
>
> behaved the same on my sparc64 as 'boot net'. The OpenPROM used RARP
> (not DHCP) to find the second-stage loader even with 'boot net:dhcp'.
> Then it TFTPs to whatever machine replied to the RARP. I wonder if
> net:dhcp is a cue to Solaris's inetboot? They have this massively
> complicated 'wanboot' framework now, too, including multiple
> cryptographic keys and CGI scripts on web servers. <shudder>.
>
> I put /boot/loader in the tftpboot directory and named it C0A8017C to
> match the IP of my Sun, 192.168.1.124. /boot/loader then used DHCP
> (not bootparams) to get just one option, root-path:
>
> host amber {
> fixed-address amber;
> hardware ethernet 08:00:20:xx:xx:xx;
> option root-path "69.31.131.61:/export0/nbnfs/amber";
> }
>
> and /boot/loader loaded loader.conf and whatever else it needed over
> NFS rather than TFTP. The only thing loaded over TFTP was
> the file C0A8017C (a copy of /boot/loader).
>
> a> lofiadm
>
> I didn't end up using this nor the mfsroot, because I didn't use
> sysinstall. I just extracted all the {base,doc,src,..}.{aa,ab,ac...}
> files by hand. But it's good to have those instructions written down
> because others will probably want to netboot into sysinstall.
>
> Now I have three more problems:
>
> 1. The NetBSD NFS server I'm using doesn't support locking, so I
> can't run vipw or pwd_mkdb, and vi always says 'UNLOCKED' in the
> status bar. I can't 'mount -u -o -L 69.31.131.61:/ex.... /'
> because the -L option is documented, obeyed only on initial mount,
> not for remount. Is there a way to get this option turned on for
> the initial root mount?
>
> 2. I tried 'mdmfs -s 32m md /tmp' and it never returned to the
> prompt. ^C doesn't work, and I can't get to 'ok' or to 'ddb>' by
> pressing BREAK. Is there a sysctl to obey BREAK?
>
> 3. Boot hung after ``waiting 15 seconds for SCSI devices to settle''
> when I have my Firewire card installed. The Install CD boots
> successfully with the card installed and even makes an fwe0. Is
> there a way to use the loader to disable a broken device like this
> SCSI-over-Firewire? I tried commands like 'disable-module sbp'
> but it always says 'sbp not found'.
>
> sorry for all the questions. I'm just getting started.
>
--
edoneel at sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
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