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Netbooting



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Hello,

I finally got a new disk for my iBook G4, big enough for both MacOS X and NetBSD. Since I wanted to use WAPBL I couldn't just create a bunch of APPLE_UFS partitions and untar the binary sets, I had to either burn a CD or netboot the thing. I didn't want to waste a CD and I already have netbooting environments for sparc(64), sgimips and shark so adding just another one can't be too much trouble. So I thought. A while ago I installed NetBSD on a beige G3 that way without too much trouble but that machine's got OF 2.01f while the iBook uses 3.0. And that's where the troubles start. Supposedly you just set up dhcpd and tftpd to hand ofwboot.xcf to macppc clients. This ( or the equivalent ) works just fine with my other machines so the setup isn't the problem. For some reason the iBook got an IP address but no filename when booted with 'boot enet: 0'. With 'boot enet:0.ofwboot.xcf' it loaded the loader which then failed to load the kernel via nfs. Apparently it too didn't get a servername and a path to mount. I finally got it to work by having OF load the NetBSD kernel directly, which works if the kernel isn't too big ( on this iBook the limit seems to be around 4MB ), the kernel's DHCP client finally managed to obtain the right parameters to mount its root.

So, what changed? I know dhcpd got updated. Anything that ofwboot.xcf didn't catch up with? I know that Apple's OF is quirky and may need some extra workarounds in dhcpd but acording to the docs it used to work.

Long story short - if you want to netboot an OF3 Mac from a -current server your best bet is to let OF load the kernel directly since ofwboot.xcf seems to be broken. And the kernel image better be smaller than 4MB although different machines may have different limits here. The same ofwboot.xcf had no trouble loading a kernel from a disk however.

have fun
Michael

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