> I'm trying to set up my server for diskless boots, as described > in the diskless(8) manpage (at the moment, more or less mostly as > an academic exercise, but I was planning to take my oldish > laptops to some use this way).
[...] > I have already tried to have tcpdump have a look at what's going > on, but unfortunately, I don't see very much in its output: > | $ tcpdump -n -s 140 -i em0 host 172.23.13.138 To debug diskless boots, you'd better use an Ethernet address filter, to be sure you get all of the boot phases, from the reverse arp request onwards (i.e. tcpdump -i foo0 ether host xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx) > The previously mentioned old mailinglist posting mentioned that > rpc.bootparamd'd be needed, but starting it or not does not make > any difference (and http://www.netbsd.org/docs/network/netboot/intro.i386.html > kind of implies that rpc.bootparamd is not needed on i386, and > the manpage actively discourages it). It would make a difference, assuming you have a proper bootparamd configuration in /etc/bootparams to tell the diskless machine which NFS shares to mount. I am not surprised the NetBSD documentation don't mention bootparamd anymore, because NetBSD's way of doing diskless setups is different. Their documentation applies to NetBSD only. Miod
