Alex Kirk wrote:
> 
> > 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...

CDROM drives have been commodity long enough that some people
can't remember seeing a computer without one.

> > 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.
> 
> Andy,
> 
> Perhaps a smart thing to do before we invest too much effort into this would
> be to make a collection of all of the NetBSD documentation on the subject,
> and then see if it can be modified to explain properly. I think we're a lot
> more likely to get diffs to existing documents published than something
> entirely new...and hey, any work we can save is a good thing. I'd have to
> say, though, that after a quick perusal, "man diskless" definitely is a big
> candidate for updating.

Everything I've ever seen (netbooting 3+ OSs on 4+ architectures in the
last 5 years) assumed the reader knew the protocols and just needed a
reference for the configuration files.  Add to the todo list an overview
of the evolving protocols (bootpd, dhcpd, PXE...), a picture of the
protocol stack (ethernet, IP, UDP) and how the netboot protocols fit in
layers and sequence, and basic diagnostics (options to tcpdump to get
useful traces to post to the list when something doesn't work).

I'll help review or write any of the above if it'll get committed
somewhere people can find it.

-Neil

> Alex Kirk