Re: Diskless installs?

Martin Husemann <[email protected]> Fri, 1 Aug 2025 07:55:58 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.devel.installation
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Fri, Aug 01, 2025 at 07:49:10AM +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 31, 2025 at 06:36:38PM -0400, Mouse wrote:
> > I can of course unpack sets, but my experience with older versions
> > leads me to expect that there are various other things that need to be
> > done after unpacking the sets to produce a bootable system.
> 
> Oh, you are right - we should document the manual setup steps somewhere.
> 
> It is not a long list. Assuming you are in single user mode on the new
> client machine with all sets unpacked and / writable:
> 
>  - run: cd /dev && sh MAKEDEV all

And forgot to mention: in the NFS case I usually do this step on the
server before booting the client, as the client will check for /dev/console
being valid and do a tmpfs union for /dev otherwise which makes it
tricky to fix the setup.

But this might not work on arbitrary (non-NetBSD) NFS servers.

In regular setups we avoid the issue by running on a separate root with
different /dev, so it is easy to populate something like /targetroot/dev/

Martin