Ja'far Railton <ibn.richard@gmail.com> writes:
> On 9/2/05, Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com> wrote:
>
>> It probably *will* boot off of USB key if you bought it in the last
>> year. Just try. It probably will just work. My thinkpad, which is
>> older, "just works".
>
> This is an R30 (c. 4 years old?) BTW do you know a good HOWTO for
> booting from memory key, i.e. setting it up?

It isn't very hard.

1) you must put an MBR on the key and it must list the NetBSD
   partition as the active partition.
2) disklabel, newfs, and installboot the thing, and it all should
   "just work"...

>> > I guess I can try a netboot from my other laptop, once
>> > I read through the howtos and get it set up.
>> 
>> That's pretty easy to set up. You don't even actually need to set up
>> NFS -- you can just directly netboot an INSTALL kernel from tftp.
>
> OK. I should try this.

To do what I just suggested:

1) You'll need to set up something like this in your dhcpd.conf to get
   dhcpd to answer with a different boot file during the initial stage
   and during the stage when the pxe loaded boot loader runs:

host install {
       hardware ethernet 0:11:43:cd:bb:ca;
       fixed-address 10.0.0.76;

       # This section allows dhcpd to respond with different answers
       # for the two tftp requests for the bootloader and kernel.

       if substring (option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 20) =
       "PXEClient:Arch:00000" {

               # This bootloader sets video console
               filename "pxeboot_ia32.bin";

       } else {
               # This is the name of the kernel image to load:
               filename "tftp:netbsd";
       }
}

and you will need a /tftpboot/ directory that looks like:

$ ls -l /tftpboot/
total 2810
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  2808659 Mar 25 14:59 netbsd
-r--r--r--  1 root  wheel    41784 Mar 25 14:59 pxeboot_ia32.bin

and you will need a tftp line in your inetd.conf like this:

tftp            dgram   udp     wait    root    /usr/libexec/tftpd   tftpd -l -s /tftpboot

With this setup, you can simply load an INSTALL kernel over the
net, which is pretty easy.


Perry