>After having trouble with tryibng to do a croos-platform disklabel, I
>decided to go the diskless boot route. Which is all good, except for 
>(another) lack of documentation. It points out that when creating a root
>FS for the diskless workstation, if the root FS  is coming from a binary
>distribution, that I need to populate /dev. Ok, this makes sense. But how
>do I populate /dev w/o having a booted decstation 3100? Any ideas? Could
>somebody send me a tarred /dev from a decstation 3100 running 1.2?

Usually, you can just run the NetBSD/pmax MAKEDEV script on the NFS
server with the diskless machine's /dev.    As long as the
device-special nodes have the right major and minor numbers, accessing
them across  NFS will work just fine: the major/minor pair map
to the `right' device on the diskless NetBSD/pmax box.

One case where this doesn't work is when using a Digital Unix NFS server
for the  diskless machine's root filesystem. OSF/1 aka DU applies
some internal remapping to the device inodes, such this doesn't quite
work.  The NetBSD/pmax web page has details and a suggested
work-around

--Jonathan