> Does anybody know of a tiny-BSD implementation which does DHCP; something
> which comes on a single floppy and can be stuffed into any PC on our LAN
> to boot and give me a VT220 terminal?

I recently put together an "almost-diskless" X Terminal installation for 
486/33's and 486/66's which fits on a floppy.  You need very little besides 
the kernel to get a prompt-- just init and a shell.  Dhclient-script makes 
only one minor complaint about being unable to write resolv.conf, but 
otherwise will function in read-only root environments with no modifications.  
dhclient itself needs /var/db to be read-write.  I solved this in my config by 
mounting an MFS over /tmp and providing a symlink from /var/db to /tmp/db on 
the read-only floppy.  (I also make other small writes in /tmp as well, you 
can probably get away with mounting on /var/db directly).


I'd suggest a layout like this:


/
	netbsd                     (custom, take out everything you don't need)

	bin/
		[
		echo
		mkdir
		sh

	etc/
		dhclient-script
		dhclient.conf      (custom or 0 length)
		fstab
		rc                 (custom)

	sbin/
		dhclient
		ifconfig
		init
		route
		mount
		mount_mfs
		mount_nfs

	dev/
		(devices you need)

	var/
		db -> /tmp/db

	tmp/



To fit this on a floppy, you'll need to compress it-- the details on creating 
compressed boot image floppies I can't provide.  I simply put a compressed tar 
on the floppy and unpacked it to a small root partition on the destination 
machine's hard drive.


As an example, here's my custom stage-one rc file from the floppy:

----
#!/bin/sh

# Philosophy: This file does the minimum to get the machine on the network
# and mounts a directory which contains (along with other files) a script
# to continue the rest of the process

# Don't let the user abort this

trap "" 2 3

PATH=/sbin:/bin/:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin
export PATH

# A small memory based file system to allow local writes

mount_mfs -s 200 /dev/wd0b /tmp

# Obtain network information from DHCP
# /var/db is a symlink to /tmp/db, thus we must create it first.

mkdir /tmp/db
ifconfig lo0 inet 127.0.0.1

# this will produce an error on machines without ep0
ifconfig ep0 media 10base2 2>/dev/null

dhclient
 
# Get /etc which contains rc2, the next script to execute

NFS_SERVER=155.246.89.68
NFS_ROOT=/share/netbsd/i386

mount -o ro $NFS_SERVER:$NFS_ROOT/etc  /etc

if [ ! -f /etc/rc2 ]; then
        echo "[rc]: panic: can't find /etc/rc2"
        exit 1
fi

exec /bin/sh /etc/rc2
----


I can provide more details on any of this stuff, but I'll leave it at this 
until you (or anyone else for that matter) decides they want to know more.

Good luck.

-- 
Bill Squier (groo@cs.stevens-tech.edu)
http://www.cs.stevens-tech.edu/~groo
Ph: (201)216-5486   Fax: (201)216-8249