Updated 'diskless operation' section for the handbook

[Brooks Davis]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 05:19:19PM +0100, Jean-Francois Dockes wrote:
> I have updated my update of the 'diskless operation' section.
> 
> I have included information specific to FreeBSD 5.x, and more details about
> using PXE.
> 
> Some of the information is supposedly more accurate because I have taken
> more time to investigate how some of the mechanisms actually work.
> 
> On a related note, I think that PR docs/62412 should be closed as it is
> mostly wrong AFAIK. I have tested every method described in the section,
> both with release 4.9 and 5.2, and everything works as advertised (at least
> on my test machines which have fairly common hardware, both quite old and
> quite new). There were a few glitches in the previous version of the
> section, but no real show-stopper either.
> 
> I'd be very glad to welcome your corrections, and hope that the new version
> can be included in the handbook.

Overall, I like the changes.  Explaining the reasons behind various is a
nice addition.  You should provide a unified diff of the changes as that
is the project standard.  Some comments:

- In the DHCP+PXE configuration, why do you use "pxeboot" as the path
when normal roots have "boot/pxeboot" installed by default?  It's even
on the release CDs, which is really handy for installing on new servers
that don't have removable media.

- You might or might not want to mention that with PXE boot you can
leave off the host's IP in option root-path as long as you don't enable
the kernel option BOOTP (I'll be fixing that limitation shortly.)

- On current /etc/defaults/make.conf became
/usr/share/examples/etc/make.conf.

- You might want to talk about pxeboot's other make options,
BOOT_PXELDR_PROBE_KEYBOARD and BOOT_PXELDR_ALWAYS_SERIAL.

- If you need to set nfs_server_enable in rc.conf, you won't generally
have a mountd to kill -HUP.  I've generally found that unreliable anyway
so I usually just give up and reboot.

- The way the clone_root script makes /usr seperate is a minor
annoyance for a couple of reasons.  First, if you let the diskless
kernel get out of sync, there are binaries in /usr that may break such
as netstat.  Second, the script that populats /usr doesn't work without
/usr.

- The refrences to /etc/rc.diskless[12] are somewhat obsolete in 5.x
since they have been replaced by /etc/rc.d/initdiskless and
/etc/rc.d/diskless.  I'm planning to complicate matters further by
removing diskless and replacing it with several scripts that handle its
various functions.  You may want to leave the refrences as is for now.

- I'd say running MAKEDEV is pointless or unnecessicary rather then
useless on 5.x.

Thanks for doing this.

-- Brooks

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