Is there any reason why diskless installs aren't supported/encouraged?
It seems most people who want to install NetBSD/pmax probably have at
least one machine laying around that can do bootp, rarp, tftp,
bootparms & nfs.

For grins, I took a semi-generic kernel (NEWCONF w/different timezone &
maxusers=16) built from sources & configured an diskless setup into it:
config                nfsnetbsd root on nfs swap on nfs

I then took the resulting nfsnetbsd.elf & ran Ted's elf2ecoff (from
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/pmax/tools/elftools.tar.gz) on
it & put the result up for tftp on my AlphaServer (running DU).

I configured my personal machine (running NetBSD/pmax) following the
outline suggested in the diskless(8) man page.

% grep giotto /etc/ethers
8:0:2b:1e:39:cc  giotto 

% cat /etc/bootparams
giotto          root=serov:/usr/export/pmax/root \
                swap=serov:/usr/export/pmax/swap \
                dump=serov:/usr/export/pmax/swap 

% cat /etc/exports
/usr/export/pmax -maproot=root giotto.isds.duke.edu 

& started rarpd, rpc.bootparamd, nfsd & mountd.

I booted a 5k/120 (giotto) vi 'boot 3/tftp' It found & loaded its
kernel from the alpha via bootp/tftp. It rarped, found its name, and
got its root & swap file info via bootparam & then got some sort of
RPC error when attempting to mount root from my machine & paniced.  I
haven't explored this very deeply, but it looks like diskless installs
should be possible.

I also tried the above with a pmax.  It got as far as loading the
kernel, then hung when probing for tc0.

Three questions:

1) I'm probably doing something wrong w/my diskless setup.
Specifically, I'm probably doing something wrong with setting up my
NetBSD box for NFS serving.  The error message I got was
panic: nfs_boot: mountd root, error=72
(BTW- 72 corresponds to EBADRPC)

Anybody see something obviously wrong about my setup?

2) How does one build a kernel for a pmax these days?  I just assumed
that the generic NEWCONF kernel would work.. Do I need to comment out
the TC stuff?

3) Does anybody know of any DECstations that don't support bootp/tftp?

Drew
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#		Andrew Gallatin, Computer Project Manager                    #
#	    Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences		     #
#	  Box 90251, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0251		     #
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