Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 11:10:18 +0300 From: Diomidis Spinellis <dds@aueb.gr> To: Josef Karthauser <joe@freebsd.org> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Booting a machine over the network without pxe. Message-ID: <3F55A1EA.B9F8CB23@aueb.gr> References: <20030902205418.GB30374@genius.tao.org.uk> <20030902210904.GB30594@genius.tao.org.uk>
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Josef Karthauser wrote: > On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 09:54:18PM +0100, Josef Karthauser wrote: > > Does anyone have any experience of booting a machine over the > > network, like pxeboot, but without running PXE on a network card. > > I imagine that it should be possible to load pxeboot at the boot: > > prompt and have everything just work. > > > > I could really do with booting my laptop into -stable, where it's only > > got -current installed. I do however have a -stable server on site with > > plenty of disk space. It would be really cool to remote boot of that > > via NFS mounts, etc. > > I should have said, my network card is an aue (usb) device which cuts > etherboot out of the equation. I have used picobsd(8) to load a bare bones kernel and some configuration files on an old Pentium-100 16MB laptop using a floppy disk. rc.local then NFS mounts the real directories over the net: mount spiti.spinellis.gr:/usr /usr mount spiti.spinellis.gr:/home /home rm bin sbin /stand/mkdir bin sbin /stand/mount_nfs spiti.spinellis.gr:/bin /bin /stand/mount_nfs spiti.spinellis.gr:/sbin /sbin It took me about two days to jugle the binaries in a way that allowed the initial boot to view the network via the PCMCIA card and to configure the system remove picobsd remnants once the large filesystems were available over NFS. At some point during the boot process you feel as if a straightjacket is removed: you have all your binaries and a lot of disk space available. Before that stage you have to be very careful with how you allocate the floppy's disk space. Diomidis - dds@
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