Richard Rauch wrote:

> How much trouble is it to set up a netbooting system?

There are a few choices to make, such as how to boot (PXE, network
card PROM, diskette) and then a few pieces of software to configure
(DHCP, TFTP, NFS).

It's not rocket science.  Slightly complicated by the fact that the
techniques have changed a bit over the years (PXE, DHCP replacing
bootparams and the like).  Troubleshooting is fun: diagnostics at
boot time are notoriously difficult.  It helps to have a monitor
on the system you're trying to boot /and/ on the server. :-)

The diskless(8) manual page was updated recently. I'd recommend
looking at it, and experimenting.

> I've never done this before, and gather that i386 machines are
> congenitally recalcitrant here.

More like there's been little standardisation until the advent of PXE,
and even now making PXE 1.x work is "fun".  I have voodoo statements
in my /etc/dhcpd.conf that I don't understand.  (Yeah, I need to
review the updated diskless(8) manual page ... maybe later.)

> Suppose I have one or two diskless NetBSD boxes booted and running
> smoothly, and the NFS server goes down.

This only matters if the client is supposed to be usable without the
NFS server.  For the type of stuff I've done (diskless workstation) it
hasn't mattered.  For routers and such it might make sense to keep 'em
running.  In that case I'd probably configure logging via syslog
forwarding and not log directly to any filesystem.

Giles