Subject: netboot
To: None <cjs@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Mark H. Levine <yba@polytronics.com>
List: port-alpha
Date: 11/03/1997 18:25:39
I'm checking out NetBSD/Alpha 1.3 and have read your new
netbooting page at www.cynic.net.
We lost something in the recent change -- previously we at my
site were able to get the kernel from our build machine, from a
separate spot on it so as not to conflict with the running kernel
on the development machine using "rp", and then mount the network
file systems for swap and root off our disk farm (a sparc storage
array).
It seems you are now using the remote path (rp=) field for both
the location of a kernel and the root directory of the nfs file
system, and these can no longer be on two separate machines, the
way it could be by using rpc.bootparamd.
This isn't severe of course, we can just ftp kernels to the sparc
array before booting and take from the root partitions, but it
also means setting up a tftp server there since we can't use the
Alphas at the same time.
Is there a workaround available, perhaps can we add new variables
that the kernel will use to support separate tftp and nfs servers
(some sort of remote nfs path, and an nfs server field)?