Subject: Re: Help me defend NetBSD's honor!
To: None <current-users@netbsd.org>
From: Peter Seebach <seebs@plethora.net>
List: current-users
Date: 03/09/2003 03:21:00
In message <20030309102631.032a8975.jmmv@menta.net>, Julio Merino writes:
>On Sun, 09 Mar 2003 02:59:33 -0600
>seebs@plethora.net (Peter Seebach) wrote:
>> 1.  Is there a sane way to make NetBSD run *totally* headless - no
>> console device?  The only serial port will be used up by something else.
>> (I can work around this temporarily, but in the long run, it's the best
>> thing for me.)

>If the machine has a graphics card plugged in, you should not have any
>problem.  Use the normal bootblocks, and a kernel with wsdisplay compiled
>in.  If there is no graphics card... ISTR that the kernel will fail to
>boot if using normal bootblocks (so you have to use serial, but you need
>it for anything else...)

No graphics; it's a headless box.  With one serial port... which we need to
use.  One workaround would be a PCMCIA serial port, or something similar, but
we want to avoid that if at all possible.

>Depends on which access you want on /... if you don't need to touch anything,
>just mount it ro, with an empty /dev (that just contains MAKEDEV*). init will
>then mount /dev as a mfs at boot time and automatically populate it with the
>device files (so ssh can change them...)

Cool!

-s