I wonder if the NetBSD Live! concept can be applied to USB flash disks (i.e.
Thumbdrives/Pen drives etc.).  I have a 512MB stick that supposedly supports USB
booting.  Most new motherboards can boot from USB devices, and I think it would be
cool to have NetBSD on my key chain.  It would also make a good portable tool
collection.


Once upon a time Steven M. Bellovin proclaimed:
> In message <20040209111518.GB44112@gualeguaychu.gov.ar>, Roberto Pereyra writes
> :
>>Hi!
>>
>>Read firdt ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/iso/1.6/README.i386live
>>
>
> Here are some notes of mine that I posted last July, based on my
> experiences.  My bottom line is that a NetBSD Live! CD is a very good
> idea, and I've often used mine, but it's a fair amount of work to set
> one up.
>
> -----
> Date:    Fri, 11 Jul 2003 20:27:13 EDT
> To:      netbsd-users@NetBSD.org
> cc:      jb@toolbox-mag.de
>
> From:    Steve Bellovin <smb@research.att.com>
> Subject: experiences with NetBSD Live!
>
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> Per some previous postings, I was trying to build a bootable NetBSD CD.
> I was directed to the NetBSD Live! package.  After some work, I got
> things working.  I figured I'd post my experiences, for the benefit of
> everyone else.
>
> First -- let me thank Joerg; without his work, I'd have had a *much*
> harder time getting anything working.  That said, I did have some
> trouble.
>
> The biggest problem was with getting the boot "floppies" built.  The
> current 1.6 version has some interaction with (or dependency on) the
> tool chain; the impression I have is that it doesn't fully understand
> the new toolchain.  Somehow, I made it work once, but I don't know how;
> I was not able to make it work again.  (I was able to fix the toolchain
> build by changing the 'make' invocation to 'make install'.  But I
> couldn't get the floppies to build reliably.)
>
> Fortunately, Jeremy Reed sent me the following simple script:
>
>     dd if=/dev/zero of=myboot.fs count=5760
>     vnconfig -t floppy288 -v -c /dev/vnd0d myboot.fs || exit
>     disklabel -rw /dev/vnd0d floppy288 || echo disklabel problem $?
>     newfs -B le -m 0 -o space -i 204800 -c 80 /dev/rvnd0a floppy288
>     $DIRTREE/usr/mdec/installboot -v -f $DIRTREE/usr/mdec/biosboot.sym /dev/rvn
> d0a
>     mount /dev/vnd0a $MOUNT
>     gzip -v -c -9 $KERNEL > $MOUNT/netbsd || echo problem with gzip $?
>     chmod a+x $MOUNT/netbsd
>     df -k $MOUNT
>     ls -la $MOUNT
>     umount $MOUNT
>     vnconfig -u vnd0d
>
> That let me use any kernel I wanted with the CD, so long as it had
>
>         config root on cd0a
>
> in its config file.  (In fact, how to do that was my original question,
> but if I'd received that answer I wouldn't have learned about NetBSD Live!,
> which I'd have regretted.)
>
> Joerg's distribution does an excellent job of stripping out things that
> aren't needed on such a CD, a much better job than I had done.  Tarring
> and gzipping /var/db/pkg is a clever idea, though I'm not convinced it
> saves enough space to be worthwhile, especially given the comparatively
> small set of packages one can fit on a NetBSD Live! CD.  Similarly, the
> script generates a stripped, compressed /netbsd file; I undid that,
> because I want to be able to run things like 'netstat'.
>
> I did use the script -- several times! -- to start building the
> distribution.  Eventually, I stopped using it and started changing
> things on my own, usually with the aid of chroot.  Running it from the
> beginning each time was too expensive, especially installing the
> packages I needed.  (I had my own specific package set that had to be
> on the installation.)  I think that the build process would have been
> simpler to use, simpler to customize, and simpler to debug if it were
> composed of several individual scripts, all invoked initially by a
> wrapper script.
>
> For reasons I don't understand, several network services are on by
> default.  I'm not sure why remote login to a NetBSD Live! machine is
> useful; in any event, I disabled them.  The CD also tries to
> enable samba; since I didn't install that package, it's harmless for me.
>
> A few invocations of 'tar' seemed to be missing -p, which caused
> erroneous permissions.  I had to fix that it one crucial instance --
> the unpacking of mfs.tgz at boot-time -- but I think there are other
> problems of that nature.  In particular, I noticed that none of the
> executables were setuid or setgid.  Of course, that is probably my
> fault; as I said, I did a lot manually.  I fixed those problems on my
> CD.
>
> The invocation in the boot-time script of xdm (and I think kdm and gdm,
> though I haven't tried those) seems wrong -- it specifies -nodaemon,
> which means that rc doesn't finish, which means that the alternate
> consoles don't seem to be enabled.  I booted the CD on two different
> machines; X worked on one, though not on the other.  I think the
> problem was the flat panel monitor; it just displayed "out of range".
> I haven't yet investigated how to fix that.  I couldn't try the
> alternate XFree86 3 servers, since I don't have any of those lying
> around.
>
> I do need to experiment more with putting defaults in /cdconf, to
> minimize the number of interactions at boot time.  I didn't see ways to
> eliminate some of the interactions; I may try to fix that.
>
> I did have to change the default prompt, since ksh -- my preferred
> shell -- doesn't handle the color-change escapes the way bash does.
> /usr/pkg/bin/bash was the shell for root, which was a problem for me
> since I didn't install that package.  (On the other hand, I also didn't
> use the provided scripts that analyze your package selection; I don't
> know if it would have warned me about bash (which I could tolerate) or
> if it would have insisted on samba, which I don't want.)
>
> The notion of reading override defaults from a floppy is a clever one;
> unfortunately, it didn't work for me.  I haven't bothered to figure out
> why, though I should investigate that -- just running mkisofs is a very
> time-consuming part of the build process.  The warning in the
> documentation about how many test CDs you'll have to build is quite
> valid, though I was lucky --  CD-RWs worked for me, even though the
> documentation says that they aren't bootable.
>
> mfs.tgz is another clever idea, though an annoying one; often, I'd
> change something in /etc, but I'd forget to rebuild the compressed
> version.  I assume that the compressed version's purpose is to make it
> possible to have mfs-mounted versions of /etc, /dev, /var, and /home; I
> wonder if there's an easier way to do it, such as copying them at boot
> time to a temporary mfs file system, mounting the mfs version over the
> real directory, copying, and then discarding the temporary mfs version.
> That would also save space on the CD.  Or perhaps more could be done
> with overlay mounts.  I don't know; I haven't tried this yet.  I did
> have to create another mfs file system -- amd doesn't work if /amd
> isn't writable. That one I had to figure out the hard way...
>
> To sum up -- if you want a bootable NetBSD CD, I suggest starting with
> NetBSD Live!.  I hope that my notes help with customization or with
> building your own CDs.
>
>
>
> 		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb
>
>
>