On Sun, 09 Mar 2003 02:59:33 -0600
seebs@plethora.net (Peter Seebach) wrote:

> 1.  Is there a sane way to make NetBSD run *totally* headless - no
> console device?  The only serial port will be used up by something else.
> (I can work around this temporarily, but in the long run, it's the best
> thing for me.)

If the machine has a graphics card plugged in, you should not have any
problem.  Use the normal bootblocks, and a kernel with wsdisplay compiled
in.  If there is no graphics card... ISTR that the kernel will fail to
boot if using normal bootblocks (so you have to use serial, but you need
it for anything else...)

> 2.  I seem to recall people doing read-only boot filesystems; is this as
> easy as I'd guess it would be (union mount an mfs filesystem over / early
> in the boot)?

Depends on which access you want on /... if you don't need to touch anything,
just mount it ro, with an empty /dev (that just contains MAKEDEV*). init will
then mount /dev as a mfs at boot time and automatically populate it with the
device files (so ssh can change them...)

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv@menta.net>
The NetBSD Project - http://www.NetBSD.org/