Hi all,

I have managed to lay my hands on an IBM NetVista 'thin client,' and I'd like
to try getting NetBSD running on it...

I know practically nothing about it other than that it seems to be an Intel (or
clone) based single board system, with a custom BIOS for netbooting.
The BIOS looks pretty comprehensive (seems to be able to do DHCP/BOOTP/TFTP and
assorted other options,) so I'm hoping to get it going with BOOTP & TFTP.

I've netbooted plenty of machines (Sun/Mac/SGI,) so I know what I'm doing with
setting things up on the server side but I've never tried it with an Intel
client.  I guess I'm going to need a bootloader and a kernel which knows to get
its root partition over NFS...  Is such a thing readily available for
NetBSD-i386?  (1.5.2 was my planned version, but I'm not wedded to it...)  Any
other tips or information people might have would also be greatly appreciated!


Longer term, I'd like to use this box as a firewall/ADSL router (my other
machines - Sun & SGI - are too ancient to have a USB port, which seems to be
required for a 'home' ADSL connection in these parts.)  Having the firewall
netboot and run over NFS seems perverse to me, but...  This thing has a Compact
Flash slot & 64MB of RAM, so I was hoping I could build a system on the flash
which mounted an MFS for /var and left everything else RO.  But I know nothing
about Compact Flash - anyone know if this is remotely feasable?

Thanks in advance,
Tim.

-- 
Tim Walls.
tim@snowgoons.fsnet.co.uk
(tim_walls@yahoo.com works, but rarely read owing to spam...)

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