Date: Thu, 04 Nov 1999 21:10:39 -0800 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Network booting, I'm off to work (was Re: GENERIC build broken) Message-ID: <199911050510.VAA01533@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 04 Nov 1999 09:12:46 EST." <14369.35974.496839.872957@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu>
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> My question boils down to: Will I be able to re-install a machine > using your new i386 netboot just as easily as I can now? Or will I > have to be physically present at each machine & diddle with the bios > to toggle between disk & netboots? And what if the NIC doesn't > support PXE? Am I just SOL? The possible options in this scenario are massively varied, and which one you go with is going to depend on a variety of factors. If we assume that you can use PXE with your boxes, you could configure each machine to try booting from the net first, and then fall back to local disk. When you wanted to recover a machine, you'd enable the DHCP server config for it, and punt the machine. If the DHCP server was answering for it, it'd come up off the network regardless of the state of the disk. In conjunction with some networked power switches this'd let you reinstall without ever leaving your office. This is what PXE was originally all about; unattended diskless (re)installs. If you can't, or don't want to use PXE network bootstraps for your machines, your 'rescue' kernel would just contain an MFS with a DHCP client and a tiny script to find your installation server's shared volume. You could use the PicoBSD tools to build this very easily. Those are what I'd consider to be the two cleanest and easiest approaches in your particular situation. -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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