16.5. Diskless Operation

Find a machine that will be your server. This machine will require enough disk space to hold the FreeBSD 2.0 binaries and have bootp, tftp and NFS services available. Tested machines:

• HP9000/8xx running HP-UX 9.04 or later (pre 9.04 doesn't work)

• Sun/Solaris 2.3. (you may need to get bootp)

Set up a bootp server to provide the client with IP, gateway, netmask.

    diskless:\
            :ht=ether:\
            :ha=0000c01f848a:\
            :sm=255.255.255.0:\
            :hn:\
            :ds=192.1.2.3:\
            :ip=192.1.2.4:\
            :gw=192.1.2.5:\
            :vm=rfc1048:

Set up a TFTP server (on same machine as bootp server) to provide booting information to client. The name of this file is cfg.X.X.X.X (or /tftpboot/cfg.X.X.X.X, it will try both) where X.X.X.X is the IP address of the client. The contents of this file can be any valid netboot commands. Under 2.0, netboot has the following commands:

A typical completely diskless cfg file might contain:

    rootfs 192.1.2.3:/rootfs/myclient
    swapfs 192.1.2.3:/swapfs
    swapsize 20000
    hostname myclient.mydomain

A cfg file for a machine with local swap might contain:

    rootfs 192.1.2.3:/rootfs/myclient
    hostname myclient.mydomain

Ensure that your NFS server has exported the root (and swap if applicable) filesystems to your client, and that the client has root access to these filesystems A typical /etc/exports file on FreeBSD might look like:

    /rootfs/myclient -maproot=0:0 myclient.mydomain
    /swapfs -maproot=0:0 myclient.mydomain

And on HP-UX:

    /rootfs/myclient -root=myclient.mydomain
    /swapfs -root=myclient.mydomain

If you are swapping over NFS (completely diskless configuration) create a swap file for your client using dd. If your swapfs command has the arguments /swapfs and the size 20000 as in the example above, the swapfile for myclient will be called /swapfs/swap.X.X.X.X where X.X.X.X is the client's IP addr, e.g.:

    # dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfs/swap.192.1.2.4 bs=1k count=20000

Also, the client's swap space might contain sensitive information once swapping starts, so make sure to restrict read and write access to this file to prevent unauthorized access:

    # chmod 0600 /swapfs/swap.192.1.2.4

Unpack the root filesystem in the directory the client will use for its root filesystem (/rootfs/myclient in the example above).

• On HP-UX systems: The server should be running HP-UX 9.04 or later for HP9000/800 series machines. Prior versions do not allow the creation of device files over NFS.

• When extracting /dev in /rootfs/myclient, beware that some systems (HPUX) will not create device files that FreeBSD is happy with. You may have to go to single user mode on the first bootup (press control-c during the bootup phase), cd /dev and do a sh ./MAKEDEV all from the client to fix this.

Run netboot.com on the client or make an EPROM from the netboot.rom file