Re: NetBooting a Quadra from MacOS X

[Hauke Fath <hauke%Espresso.Rhein-Neckar.DE@localhost>]

At 17:37 Uhr +0200 23.4.2008, Andreas Wolf wrote:
>I was very excited to learn that the latest versions of the BSD/Mac68k
>Booter programm (I'm using 2.0.1a6) are supposed to support diskless
>booting of NetBSD. Thanks to all of you, who have contributed to this.

I'm glad it's useful.  :)

>For the last couple of days I did a lot of reading on this topic
>(mainly http://www.netbsd.org/docs/network/netboot/) and tried to make
>my G5 running Panther (10.3.9 client) act as a bootp/tftp/nfs server
>for my Quadra 700. I understand that booting over the network is a
>really complicated thing, because client and server can have so many
>different architectures and OSes. Although some things on the OSX side
>work right out of the box, like tftp serving the kernel, I spent
>useless hours on trying to configure the native OSX bootp service so
>that it would cooperate with the NetBSD client. Finally I gave up and
>installed the ISC DHCP-server.

I'd have recommended that, and am actually surprised Apple doesn't ship it
(maybe with MacOS X Server, only).

> This seems to work now, too. However I
>am still struggling with the NFS setup. Either MacOSX complains about
>not being able to change whatever attributes,
>
>mountd[396]: Bad exports list line /export/macbsd/usr
>Apr 23 14:31:42 localhost mountd[396]: Can't change attributes for
>/export/macbsd/home.  See 'exports' man page.
>
>or NetBSD insists on /root being not writable.

It would help if you could provide the relevant lines of your /etc/exports
here. I am guessing: What bites you is the fact that one volume can only
ever be exported through nfs with one set of credentials. This means that
once you e.g. export a directory from a partition r/o, you cannot export
another directory from the same partition r/w.

There's a trick which I use with good success, where you null-mount the
directories that you want to export somewhere else, and then nfs export
those "volumes". An example:


From /etc/fstab:

/var/spool/export/usr.m68k      /export/usr.m68k        null ro,hidden 0 0
/var/spool/export/q840          /export/q840            null rw,hidden 0 0


From /etc/exports:

/export/q840/root       -maproot=root:wheel             q840
/export/q840/swap       -maproot=root:wheel             q840

[hauke@pizza] /u1/pkgsrc > ls -l /export/q840/
total 65577
drwxr-xr-x  17 root  wheel       512 Oct  3  2006 root
-rw-------   1 root  wheel  67108864 Oct  3  2006 swap
[hauke@pizza] /u1/pkgsrc >

From /etc/dhcpd.conf

allow bootp;

# Macintosh Quadra 840 AV
host q840 {
    hardware ethernet 08:00:07:3c:9a:51;
    fixed-address q840.causeuse.org;
    filename "netbsd.mac68k.4_99_3";
}


From /etc/inetd.conf:

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


I found OpenTransport (last version for mac68k is 1.3) a lot speedier for
tftp transfers than MacTCP, btw.

> Well, before I go into
>details, I would like to know:
>
>i) Can I use the standard 4.0 kernel at all, or is there a special
>NetBoot kernel available for Mac68k?

No, the standard kernel tries booting via dhcp.

>ii) has anyone tried a Mac68k - OS X netboot setup yet (and succeeded)?

No, sorry. To my experience, Apple likes to randomly mess with traditional
unixy configuration in MacOS X and rename them and/or (re)move them.

>iii) is the NetBSD 4.0 distribution stable with regard to netbooting?

AFAIK, yes.

>Sorry, if this is a stupid questions, but I observed random
>hangups/kernel panics at different points during the netboot process.
>The kernel from 3.1.1 gave me immediate kernel panics after the
>TFTP-download.

I wouldn't know, but I almost never use release kernels. Have you tried a
recent netbsd-3 kernel?

> I am using the 3.0.1 distribution on another Quadra and
>it seems to be rock-stable. The latter is booting/running from its
>internal SCSI-disk, though. I would be grateful for any hints or
>comments,

I'd get a recent netbsd-4 snapshot from the releng build machine, and work
from there. Or, let build.sh do a cross-build on the MacOS X machine.

        hauke


--
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)