--- Alex Kirk <alex@schnarff.com> wrote:
> Since the chatter of early last week about re-doing
> the netboot guide seems 
> to have died away to nothing, I wanted to check up
> on status with people and 
> see what, if anything, is being done. 
> 
> First off, Harold, I read your post from August on
> what needs to be done to 
> boot up a DC...and while it's got some useful
> information, some of those 
> details have changed since then, and it's not a
> terribly accessible document 
> (it's pretty good on details, but not much of a
> read). It's certainly worth 
> referring to in creating further documentation. 
> 
> Neil, have you been able to do anything up about the
> various protocols 
> involved and how they fit together? 
> 
> Andy, have you thought at all about a step-by-step
> or how to ask informed 
> questions? 
> 
> I'm going to be starting this thread up on
> netbsd-docs@netbsd.org soon, 
> since I'd like to see *something* happen with it,
> but I figured it'd be best 
> to see what everyone here was doing/thinking first. 

Alex, you're a good guy for keeping this up.

Every time I write something down, I come to the
realization that this is an onion we're peeling and I
usually end up screwing up the lower I get (because
I'm not hugely experienced with what's going on at the
protocol level). 

I think the first thing that we need to make it clear
is that there are 2 distinct things that happen here
that I needed help with (which are unique to
netbooting):

1. Loading the Kernel (network or CD)
2. Mounting the root filesystem over NFS

If we treat these 2 things seperately, I think it may
help. I understand bootstrapping from disk fairly
well, so maybe some references to that where
applicable would help?

Make it clear that loading a kernel over a network is
a very "rudimentary" process and is very hardware
specific (as the man page points out). But after the
kernel loads, it is a rather smart program that can
handle things at a higher level, which is where the
nfs server setup comes in (still not trivial, but not
so dependent on low level protocol skills).

I don't know... I'm probably not the right guy to do
this after all.

Andy

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