On Thu, 6 May 1999, David Wetzel wrote:

> > From: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@nas.nasa.gov>
> 
> > I haven't tried this one, but an almost-identical kernel config works.
> >
> > Have you successfully netbooted before?
> 
> No. Once I have done, I write an howto-html page for www.netbsd.org/macppc.
> 
> I cannot believe that nobody here has managed to netboot on a G3 PowerBook  
> and knows why and how...

I have. I just didn't want to start telling you how to do something you've
done already. :-)

Here's what will happen:

When you say "boot enet:0" in OF, 

1) OFW will fire up ethernet 0 (bmac in my machine), and send a bootp
request for info.

2) (with my bootptab entry) OFW will contact tftpd on that same server and
request the file named in the bf= entry. This file needs to be
ofwboot.elf. 

3) ofwboot.elf will then try to nfs mount the nfs root from the bootp info
(the rp= field), and then load "netbsd" from there. Then you're off!

My setup:

man 8 diskless    helped a lot here. It and the flow chart above were all
I needed to get going.

I've got bootpd, tftpd, and nfsd running on the boot server.

In my bootptab, I've got:

themac:\
	bf=ofwboot.elf:hn:ht=ether:\
	ha=<hard ether address of machine>:ip=<ip address of mac>:\
	gw=<IP address of default gateway>:rp=/nfs_export_path:\
	sm=255.255.255.0:hn=auto:

ha is the hard ether address of the card. I found this on the box, it's on
the back stickers, and from OFW, if you do a "dev enet" and then
".properties", the "local-mac-address" property also shows the address.

ip is the machine's IP address, gw the gateway (default route), and sm is
the subnet mask.I'm not sure why I have hn in there twice.

bf is the file used to boot. For NetBSD/macppc, we use two stage boot
loaders - OFW boots a small file (this one) which in turn loads the
kernel. This should be "ofwboot.elf".

rp is the path (/usr/src/extra_space on my machine) to the nfs-exported
root for the machine. ofwboot.elf will look there for "netbsd"



In inetd.conf, I have tftp turned on to start tftpd using /tftpboot as its
directory. "ofwboot.elf" is at /tftpboot/ofwboot.elf.



I have nfs_server=YES in rc.conf, and I have /etc/exports set up so that
the directory in rp= above is nfs exported to the IP address assigned to
the netbooting mac.


That's it!

Take care,

Bill