Folks,

I've finally got hold of an old vs2000 and tried to remote boot it with
NetBSD. I followed the procedure posted to this list and also read the
diskless(8), mountd(8) and exports(5) man pages. The machine I'm trying
to boot from is a 486 PC running NetBSD 1.2.1.

mopd, rarpd and rpc.bootparamd all seem to work perfectly, I can boot
the vs2000 as far as loading the kernel. It panics when trying to start
swapping.

According to the diskless(8) manpage the NetBSD bootserver should have
an /etc/exports entry like the following:

 /export/myclient -maproot=root -alldirs myclient

The exports(5) manpage also mentions this syntax, however the mountd(8)
manpage does not mention the -alldirs flag. This flag is supposed to let
the client mount any directory below the /export/myclient directory.
I've created the /export/myclient directory, the subdirectory root (with
the netbsd kernel) and created a 16MB swapfile in the /export/myclient
directory. According to the exports(5) manpage the -r switch to mountd
should allow the -alldirs flag as well as mounting a regular file
(/exports/myclient/swap). This switch is not mentioned at all in the
mountd(8) manpage.

Anyway, it doesn't work as mountd keeps complaining about "bad exports
list" as long as the -alldirs flag is present in /etc/exports. In order
to get the vs2000 to boot the kernel I had to change the /etc/exports
entry to:

 /export/myclient/root -maproot=root myclient

It then booted the kernel but could of course not find its swap file as
entered in /etc/bootparams:

 myclient  root=server:/export/myclient/root \
           swap=server:/export/myclient/swap

Entering a line like the following to /etc/exports didn't help as mountd
complained "can't change attributes...":

 /export/myclient/swap -maproot=root myclient

So, what next? I would really like to be able to boot the diskless
vs2000 from my NetBSD PC.

Gunnar

--
Gunnar Helliesen   | Bergen IT Consult AS  | NetBSD/VAX on a uVAX II
Systems Consultant | Bergen, Norway        | '86 Jaguar Sovereign 4.2
gunnar@bitcon.no   | http://www.bitcon.no/ | '73 Mercedes 280 (240D)