Tools for FreeBSD development

[Robert Watson]

On Sun, 3 Dec 2006, Garrett Cooper wrote:

> Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>> On 2006-12-02 20:05, Kevin Sanders <newroswell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 12/2/06, Alexander Kabaev <kabaev at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I personally think that having a dedicated box in disk-less
>>>> configuration is the best option out there. [...]
>>> Alexander, when you say disk-less configuration, are you referring to 
>>> booting from a network image/server?  That's an interesting idea.  I'm 
>>> fairly new to FreeBSD development also, and prefer the speed of a 
>>> dedicated box, but recently suffered my first corrupted beyond repair 
>>> system.
>> 
>> Yes, a "diskless" boot is a network-based boot :-)
>
> Look into BOOTP for that: 
> <http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-diskless.html>. 
> You may want to just use vmware (best reliable solution, IMO but it costs 
> money), depending on what resources you have on hand and what you're trying 
> to accomplish.

If using FreeBSD on i386/amd64 boxes, use PXE.  There are quite a few "instant 
setup" web pages out there that tell you how to get it running.  pxeboot makes 
life incredibly easy, as you can load kernels, modules, configurations, etc, 
over NFS.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge