Diskless X Server: a how to guide

Jerry Kendall

jerry@kcis.com

28-December-1996

With the help of some friends on the FreeBSD-hackers list, I have been able to create a diskless X terminal. The creation of the X terminal required first creating a diskless system with minimal utilities mounted via NFS. These same steps were used to create 2 separate diskless systems. The first is altair.kcis.com. A diskless X terminal that I run on my old 386DX-40. It has a 340Meg hard disk but, I did not want to change it. So, it boots from antares.kcis.com across a Ethernet. The second system is a 486DX2-66. I setup a diskless FreeBSD (complete) that uses no local disk. The server in that case is a Sun 670MP running SunOS 4.1.3. The same setup configuration was needed for both.

I am sure that there is stuff that needs to be added to this. Please send me any comments.

1. Creating the boot floppy (On the diskless system)

Since the network boot loaders will not work with some of the TSR's and such that MS-DOS uses, it is best to create a dedicated boot floppy or, if you can, create an MS-DOS menu that will (via the config.sys/autoexec.bat files) ask what configuration to load when the system starts. The later is the method that I use and it works great. My MS-DOS (6.x) menu is below.

Example 1. config.sys

    [menu]
    menuitem=normal, normal
    menuitem=unix, unix
    [normal]
    ....
    normal config.sys stuff
    ...
    [unix]

Example 2. autoexec.bat

    @ECHO OFF
    goto %config%
    
    :normal
    ...
    normal autoexec.bat stuff
    ...
    goto end
    
    :unix
    cd \netboot
    nb8390.com
    
    :end