Copyright © 2010 Erik Nørgaard
This guide describes how to set up FreeBSD for PXE booting network clients for Jumpstart installation and diskless operation. The guide has been updated for FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE on the i386 platform and some errors corrected.
I wrote this guide while setting up a Jumpstart server to document what I had done so I could get back on the track if necessary. I used other guides as reference, but found that these were either outdated or lacked important details.
The diskless setup is similar in many some respects, with the main difference that the root file system must be nfs mounted. It is possible to do Jumpstart with nfs mount of the installation media. For this reason I decided to do a complete guide for PXE Boot covering both Jumpstart installation and diskless operation.
This guide was first written for FreeBSD release 6.1 but I have now updated it for to FreeBSD release 8.0. Many things have become much easier since previous releases, both for Jumpstart installation and diskless clients. This guide may not be correct for previous versions of FreeBSD.
Warning Following the instructions in this guide may render your system(s) useless and cause data loss. Whatever you are up to, it is on your own risk. I did screw up my own system quite seriously while trying to get things to work with jumpstart installation. I hope I have documented the path that does not screw up (too much) :-)
If you find errors, omissions or ambiguities in this guide feel free to contact me.
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