Soekris and PXE booting...

Quoting Richard Rauch (rkr@olib.org):
> 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.

I keep an image on my large-disk server box for most of my machines,
just for that "oh shit" moment.  The sparcs, alpha and Macs can
get an image from the net (net/openbsd and Solaris for sparc).


>  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...)

For running a Soekris:  No, you want it stand alone.  I have
one running on a 5MB image, another running with 256MB (it was
on sale and it was the first CF and first x86 machine in the
house that wasn't always up).

If your NFS server stops, count on its clients stopping too.

I mount readonly, I syslog to the always up machine (which isn't
always up these days).

I've written the embsd list and soekris tech about mfs.  /var is
NOT appropriate.  chunks of var are.  I symlink to /mfs/ things
like /var/tmp, /var/run, some dhcp things, resolv.conf, host.random
and some other things.  I seed them from /mfs.PROTO on boot.

I also mfs mount /var/named/zones (named is chrooted).

I mount /dev/ as MFS and copy from /dev.PROTO (faster than MAKEDEV)
on boot.
/devfs is appropriate here.

> 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.)

Not 'style' - they take CF cards.  I seeded it with a card in a
laptop.  PXE wasn't easy to do then, but for FreeBSD.

> 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.  (^&

Silent and low power is nice.  I run DHCP client and server on it,
NTP and a 6bone end point. I run an IPv6 -> v4 gateway (much internal
is IPv6), a wireless access point, BIND (caching + secondary for
all but the DDNS zones).  It's readonly so a hard power cycle is
harmless.  With my terminal server is handles many serial devices
(some I/O, X10 device) and other stuff.  It can live on my UPS for
hours and hours and hours (10watt + a hub).  With a solar panel
and a battery it never needs to use grid power.