--- Andy R <quadreverb@yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Alex Kirk <alex@schnarff.com> wrote:
> > This is a valid point. I remember the "diskless
> > manpage" (as it were) was 
> > particularly difficult to break into as a newbie
> to
> > the subject (but not 
> > UNIX in general). Perhaps we ought to look it
> over,
> > find obvious problems, 
> > and submit some fixes. 
> 
> Yes, I will begin work on this. I thought I already
> wrote something, so maybe I can find it. I hope I
> can
> submit it here for criticism before I give it to
> anyone else as a fix. I certainly don't have a huge
> amount of experience with netbooting, which possibly
> makes me a good person to write about it in this
> context!
> 
> > > to know what FM to read too! Reading the man
> page
> > for
> > > dhcpd doesn't give much connection to nfsd, not
> > > obvious anyway in the context of a diskless
> > client.
> > > See what I'm getting at?
> > 
> > Yes, I certainly do. It seems like the NetBSD team
> > will always welcome diffs 
> > to improve documentation...this is what should be
> > done, I think. 
> > 
> > Since you're the one who's complained the most
> > vehemently on the subject, 
> > Andy, do you think you could at least compile a
> list
> > of which docs are the 
> > worst? I'll be happy to do rewrites, I'd just like
> > to make sure I don't miss 
> > anything you think is particularly nasty. 
> 
> I will begin work on this soon. I'm warning you
> though, it's just going to be a "cookbook" of
> programs/daemons needed and in what order they run
> in
> order to get a diskless client to boot. And it's
> going
> to be in the context of Dreamcast and Sparc, which
> are
> the only 2 I've ever netbooted successfully.
> 
> The need for this isn't 100% obvious to me yet since
> netbooting has been around for as long as reliable
> networks just about, and people have been doing it a
> long time. Maybe this documentation already exists
> somewhere and I missed it? I certainly spent some
> hours trying to find it though...
> 
> My only reason for something like this would be to
> prevent conceptual questions on netbooting itself
> (oh,
> also known as diskless clients for those who didn't
> make the connection). I understand what dhcp does. I
> know what nfs does, I know what tftpd and arp and
> all
> the rest are. Now, how to tie it all together? That
> will be what I try for.

Something ocurred to me just after I finished writing
that. It's a lack of understanding of the basic way
that a computer boots that is the problem here. I
lacked that because I guess I never needed to learn
until I had to netboot a diskless machine. Now I know.
For some, this is not a problem. For those of us who
never had to learn this, some documentation in this
area should probably help.

Andy

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