Re: Netbooting an xserve G5?

Hi Alexey,

Thank you very much - I totally missed that guide.

It worked, and I am able to boot single user now.

The only problem: the host runs e x c r u c i a t i n g l y slow - not as in
'it lags!', but as in 'I have to wait for minutes until what I type on the keyboard
appears on the screen', so the system really isn't usable in this state.

My NFS server is a DragonFly box. It has netbooted, as I stated before, NetBSD and
OpenBSD seamlessly. I checked the FreeBSD docs, specifically the 'Advanced Networking'
section which describes PXE, but there is no mention of specific/preferred flags to be
passed to NFS/mountd.

Has anyone seen this behaviour before and/or could you share the relevant portion of your
rc.conf so I can check it against mine?

Alexey: Thanks again for the useful hint!

BR.-

* Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@freebsd.org>:
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2025 at 11:06:55AM +0000, Abu Hussain Al Mukhtar wrote:
> > Hi all!
> > 
> > As the subject line implies, I am looking for a way to netboot an
> > XServe G5 using the ppc64 port. This server I got for close to nothing
> > is on an excellent state, though unfortunately, the CD drive is not
> > really working (it ejects every CD/DVD I have ever tried to feed it), and
> > there are conflicting accounts on whether or not these machines can boot
> > from an USB stick.
> 
> I've never bothered to boot my macs from removable media, and always
> preferred netbooting, esp. given how easy it is to setup.  This is the
> first option recommended by grehan@ in his guide* and that's how I've
> installed FreeBSD on all my G4/G5 machines.  HTH,
> 
> ./danfe
> 
> *) https://people.freebsd.org/~grehan/install.html
>