Re: [solved] building userland with a netbooted system

[Al <al%familysafeinternet.com@localhost>]

Hi,

I decided that I should email to let everyone know that I was able to 
solve this. Also, I thought it would be a good idea to have this here in 
the archive just so that anyone else that needs to know this info will 
have it.

I setup the netboot system as following:

First, I setup dhcpd using the config file here: 
http://www.netbsd.org/docs/network/netboot/dhcpd.conf

touch /var/db/dhcpd.leases

Setup tftp. Mkdir /tftpboot then put ofwboot.xcf into that directory.
Then edit /etc/inetd.conf uncomment:
tftp            dgram   udp     wait    root    /usr/libexec/tftpd 
tftpd -s /tftpboot

Setup filesystem. I created /export/client/root
Untarred the kernel, then base and then etc.
(I am not sure if it is important what order they are untarred or not.)
mknod /export/client/root/dev/console c 0 0

make a 1 GB swap file:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/export/client/swap bs=4k count=25600

edit /etc/fstab adding:
nfsserver:/export/client/swap   none  swap  sw,nfsmntpt=/swap
nfsserver:/export/client/root   /     nfs   rw 0 0

edit /etc/rc.conf adding:
hostname="client"
defaultroute="192.168.1.1"
nfs_client=YES
auto_ifconfig=NO
net_interfaces=""

edit  /etc/hosts adding
192.168.1.10 client.test.net client
192.168.1.5  nfsserver.test.net nfsserver

Then booted with boot enet:,netbsd

cd /dev
at this pount you want make sure that /dev/null does not exist before 
running
/bin/sh MAKEDEV all

Then edit rc.conf and changed it to say rc_configured=Yes and rebooted.

I then did an install to the disk by editing pdisk, creating an HFS 
partition, a root, and a swap partition. Then untarred the kernel, base 
and etc in /mnt. Next, cd /mnt/dev /bin/sh MAKEDEV all and then edited the 
other etc files. Then rebooted from the diskful install.

Next, I untarred comp and then untarred the source tree and after this it 
built without a problem.

I then tarred this and installed it on the netboot system, booted from it, 
and was also able to build userland. It took about 2 days diskless versus 
about 9 hours diskful.

The problem was that something was using /dev/null before it was created. 
Although, I think that something may have been corrupting the source too. 
Really I did take the round about way to prove this, but I did prove that 
I can build 5.1.2 on a diskless system.

Best Regards,
Al