Re: FreeBSD boot menu is missing


On Nov 27, 2008, at 2:30 PM, Garrett Cooper wrote:

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Kevin Day <kevin@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Just in case anyone needs a real step-by-step guide to getting a diskless
PXE/NFS boot going, I wrote this up a little while ago.

http://sigsegv.org/wiki/How_to_do_a_PXE_netboot_install_of_FreeBSD

The existing documentation was either a bit out of date, glossed over some
of it or just flat out didn't work for me. Takes an existing running system,
clones it into /nfsroot, enables dhcpd/tftpd/nfsd, and relies on rc.diskless
to make the magic happen after boot.

That's a good brief guide, but a lot of the information is already
contained in: <http://people.freebsd.org/~alfred/pxe/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/pxe/article.html >.

That reminds me that I need to add some documentation for booting
OpenFirmware Mac's with Netboot (some experiences that I had at Cisco
that I wanted to pass down for others).


Saying this carefully so I don't sound like I'm volunteering to update a bunch of docs... :)

The problems I encountered with that PXE guide is:

* It's now 5 floppies instead of 2 to get sysinstall going. The PXE loader can't handle this (keeps prompting you for the next floppy). Alfred's changes to loader.rc don't work anymore.
* The loader has problems with launching gzipped kernels brought over PXE for some reason. I dunno when this started.
* vnconfig is now mdconfig
* His guide was just to get sysinstall running, not end up with a usable diskless workstation.
* It doesn't mention the dhcp option "root-path", which was where I kept getting stuck.

It worked flawlessly when 4.0 was -CURRENT, but it's a bit out of date in a few places.


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