Re: gateway box without keyboard and monitor.

[Josh Tolley <josh_(_at_)_raintreeinc_(_dot_)_com>]

Nick Holland wrote:
> messmate wrote:
>
> > Well, what a long answer ...... do you remember your first steps ??

I'm still going through my first steps -- and reading the manual has 
proved not only much less painful, but much more instructive than 
getting reamed by misc@ for not having done my homework! *grin*

> > 1.I've learned that a question (  stupid as it can ) save houres of
> > time, mistakes (maybe serious) and helps the learning process.
>
>
> sure.  Having other people work for free is great.  However, understand
> that eventually, the slaves may revolt.
>
> However, I strongly disagree with your premise..  There is no better
> learning technique than to work at it a while.

I have to register agreement with Nick, here. As an example: I spent 
(some of) the weekend trying -- and eventually succeeding -- to get my 
first Soekris to boot disklessly. I ended up using tcpdump on my obsd 
server to record the boot process from the soekris to a file, which I 
then fed to ethereal. I knew the machine had mounted / over nfs, and was 
failing somewhere after that. Ethereal told me every file it looked for, 
in what order, and what files it found. I learned a lot being able to 
see exactly what it tried to do and in what order (I expect systrace or 
some such would give me this same info, but I've not yet invested the 
time to figure out how to use it). As I looked one by one at the files I 
didn't recognize in the process, I found /etc/ttys, which, as it turned 
out, wasn't set up to support the soekris's com0 console, since I'd 
copied the root filesystem from the server to the export for the 
soekris. I fixed that, made a related change to boot.conf after a 
helpful hint found on Google, and it works. But I also got a nice view 
of the obsd boot process in action thanks to poking around for a while.

Josh Tolley