David TAILLANDIER wrote:

> Very well indeed. And as a dummy in *nix I found all this stuff really 
> wonderfull... except for documentation :-)   Hard to find.

How often did you find a documentation when you _real_ had problems with
something in another OS? Didn't the help say: "please plug in the cables,
click here, click there, call your admin" ? Does any other OS(family) have
something like man pages? And if man doesn't have it, google solves most
of my problems.

> Since last week, I have the project to use those boxes without 
> hard-drive ; only a CD for programs and a diskette for config files. 
> I already done everything (hard-drive partition read-only, fetching 
> config files from a write protected diskette, ram-drive, small kernel, 
> etc). 
> I just don't know how to bootstrap 100% from CD. I found nowhere any
> documentation. May I have a look inside the source ?  (hard for me).
> I think about something like the install CD but I can't find docs.
> Maybe I don't search into the right place.

Look for El Torito (format for boot cds), maybe the manual of cdrecord or
mkisofs tells something about that. Did you google for "netbsd boot cd" ?

> I know how to put a boot-loader + kernel on CD (just like on any 
> diskette) but the kernel then read everything on the hard-drive as I 
> don't know how to explain him to read the root from the CD.

(Wild guess:) 
The config file for the kernel:

config root on cd0a type ffs
(something like that)

> All this to have a cool box: ON/OFF 50 times in a day if you want, no 
> hard-disk failure, low-noise, etc. 
> To correct bugs, just send a new CD to the office. 
> To change parameters (passwords, adresses, VPN, accounting) just use 
> vi to edit files on the diskette.

I guess I'll try that with my 486 in some weeks (except the vi thing *g*)