Contributed by &a.martin;. netboot.com/netboot.rom allow you to boot your FreeBSD machine over the network and run FreeBSD without having a disk on your client. Under 2.0 it is now possible to have local swap. Swapping over NFS is also still supported. Supported Ethernet cards include: Western Digital/SMC 8003, 8013, 8216 and compatibles; NE1000/NE2000 and compatibles (requires recompile) Setup Instructions

Find a machine that will be your server. This machine will require enough disk space to hold the FreeBSD 2.0 binaries and have bootp, tftp and NFS services available. Tested machines: HP9000/8xx running HP-UX 9.04 or later (pre 9.04 doesn't work) Sun/Solaris 2.3. (you may need to get bootp) Set up a bootp server to provide the client with IP, gateway, netmask. diskless:\ :ht=ether:\ :ha=0000c01f848a:\ :sm=255.255.255.0:\ :hn:\ :ds=192.1.2.3:\ :ip=192.1.2.4:\ :gw=192.1.2.5:\ :vm=rfc1048: Set up a TFTP server (on same machine as bootp server) to provide booting information to client. The name of this file is cfg.X.X.X.X (or /tftpboot/cfg.X.X.X.X, it will try both) where X.X.X.X is the IP address of the client. The contents of this file can be any valid netboot commands. Under 2.0, netboot has the following commands: help - print help list ip - print/set client's IP address server - print/set bootp/tftp server address netmask - print/set netmask hostname - print/set hostname kernel - print/set kernel name rootfs - print/set root filesystem swapfs - print/set swap filesystem swapsize - set diskless swapsize in Kbytes diskboot - boot from disk autoboot - continue boot process trans - turn transceiver on|off flags [bcdhsv] - set boot flags A typical completely diskless cfg file might contain: rootfs 192.1.2.3:/rootfs/myclient swapfs 192.1.2.3:/swapfs swapsize 20000 hostname myclient.mydomain A cfg file for a machine with local swap might contain: rootfs 192.1.2.3:/rootfs/myclient hostname myclient.mydomain Ensure that your NFS server has exported the root (and swap if applicable) filesystems to your client, and that the client has root access to these filesystems A typical /etc/exports file on FreeBSD might look like: /rootfs/myclient -maproot=0:0 myclient.mydomain /swapfs -maproot=0:0 myclient.mydomain And on HP-UX: /rootfs/myclient -root=myclient.mydomain /swapfs -root=myclient.mydomain If you are swapping over NFS (completely diskless configuration) create a swap file for your client using dd. If your swapfs command has the arguments /swapfs and the size 20000 as in the example above, the swapfile for myclient will be called /swapfs/swap.X.X.X.X where X.X.X.X is the client's IP addr, eg: # dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfs/swap.192.1.2.4 bs=1k count=20000 Also, the client's swap space might contain sensitive information once swapping starts, so make sure to restrict read and write access to this file to prevent unauthorized access: # chmod 0600 /swapfs/swap.192.1.2.4 Unpack the root filesystem in the directory the client will use for its root filesystem (/rootfs/myclient in the example above). On HP-UX systems: The server should be running HP-UX 9.04 or later for HP9000/800 series machines. Prior versions do not allow the creation of device files over NFS. When extracting /dev in /rootfs/myclient, beware that some systems (HPUX) will not create device files that FreeBSD is happy with. You may have to go to single user mode on the first bootup (press control-c during the bootup phase), cd /dev and do a "sh ./MAKEDEV all" from the client to fix this. Run netboot.com on the client or make an EPROM from the netboot.rom file Using Shared / and /usr filesystems

At present there isn't an officially sanctioned way of doing this, although I have been using a shared /usr filesystem and individual / filesystems for each client. If anyone has any suggestions on how to do this cleanly, please let me and/or the &a.core; know. Compiling netboot for specific setups

Netboot can be compiled to support NE1000/2000 cards by changing the configuration in /sys/i386/boot/netboot/Makefile. See the comments at the top of this file.