Peter Seebach writes:
 > There's a breed of "Annex" terminal servers that attempt to boot by tftp'ing
 > some file from a nearby host.  Does anyone know if NetBSD can support one
 > of these, by running a tftpd, and if so, if we need anything special in those
 > files, or where to get them?

This is very common. Xterms, terminal servers, diskless workstations,
printers and other things often work this way.  All the things that
might be needed to support such netbooting devices are available with
man pages in the netbsd dist: bootpd, rarpd, tftpd, bootparamd, named.
The only thing not shipped that might be needed for some situations is
support for MS's new DHCP protocol. While I haven't looked into it I'm
sure whatever tools are available to support that will compile nicely
on netbsd, and in any case the Annex won't need that.

As for what you need to have in the file, that will depend on the
hardware. Boot code may load the entire machine's software from a
binary file on the boot server, or it may keep that in prom and just
load a configuration file, or it may load both, and other files
besides (ie, font files for xterms).

--
Dan.