How much trouble is it to set up a netbooting system?  I've never done
this before, and gather that i386 machines are congenitally recalcitrant
here.  But, I've been pondering getting a Soekris or two, which are
supposedly able to netboot.

This sounds appealing since my present thoughts for the Soekris machine(s)
would be to provide features that would largely be moot if the internal net
were down.  (Firewalling, maybe DNS for my small net...)

Suppose I have one or two diskless NetBSD boxes booted and running
smoothly, and the NFS server goes down.  Suppose that the diskless
boxes are just acting as slaved DNS (so they could spin freely until
their caches expire) and perhaps one or both poll external systems for
NTP syncs from time to time.  How disastrous would this be?  Would the
boxes scream when they couldn't write to /var/log?  (I suppose I could
put up mfs mounts for /var and /tmp and have a background process
periodically scarf those over NFS to disk...)


Or is this just not worth it, as a practical matter of hassle, as
CF cards seem to get cheaper by the month?  (For those not familiar
with the Soekris, it can take CF style media.)

I am at this point still just toying with the idea.  I'd like to put at
least one of my "monsters" (regular computers) into semi-retirement,
instead of having them do 24/7 service in my hobby/educational domain.
the Soekris boxes look more tempting every time that I look at them.  (^&


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/