--- Alex Kirk <alex@schnarff.com> wrote:
> This is a valid point. I remember the "diskless
> manpage" (as it were) was 
> particularly difficult to break into as a newbie to
> the subject (but not 
> UNIX in general). Perhaps we ought to look it over,
> find obvious problems, 
> and submit some fixes. 

Yes, I will begin work on this. I thought I already
wrote something, so maybe I can find it. I hope I can
submit it here for criticism before I give it to
anyone else as a fix. I certainly don't have a huge
amount of experience with netbooting, which possibly
makes me a good person to write about it in this
context!

> > to know what FM to read too! Reading the man page
> for
> > dhcpd doesn't give much connection to nfsd, not
> > obvious anyway in the context of a diskless
> client.
> > See what I'm getting at?
> 
> Yes, I certainly do. It seems like the NetBSD team
> will always welcome diffs 
> to improve documentation...this is what should be
> done, I think. 
> 
> Since you're the one who's complained the most
> vehemently on the subject, 
> Andy, do you think you could at least compile a list
> of which docs are the 
> worst? I'll be happy to do rewrites, I'd just like
> to make sure I don't miss 
> anything you think is particularly nasty. 

I will begin work on this soon. I'm warning you
though, it's just going to be a "cookbook" of
programs/daemons needed and in what order they run in
order to get a diskless client to boot. And it's going
to be in the context of Dreamcast and Sparc, which are
the only 2 I've ever netbooted successfully.

The need for this isn't 100% obvious to me yet since
netbooting has been around for as long as reliable
networks just about, and people have been doing it a
long time. Maybe this documentation already exists
somewhere and I missed it? I certainly spent some
hours trying to find it though...

My only reason for something like this would be to
prevent conceptual questions on netbooting itself (oh,
also known as diskless clients for those who didn't
make the connection). I understand what dhcp does. I
know what nfs does, I know what tftpd and arp and all
the rest are. Now, how to tie it all together? That
will be what I try for.

Andy

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