Booting a m0n0wall with PXE and NFS root filesystem

Found an interesting article on booting a m0n0wall with PXE, presumably so you can rapidly test customized versions of the m0n0wall software.

http://people.freebsd.org/~nik/m0n0wall/pxe%2Bnfs/article.html

For those unfamiliar with m0n0wall, it's a software package commonly run on Soekris embedded computers. The m0n0wall site is here. I highly recommend it. It's very stable and easy to administer.

I really want to learn more about PXE booting. I've got some embedded boards I do development for. I want to be able to have the m0n0wall point these boards to a TFTP server on the network that has the development root filesystem exported via NFS. Looking at the undocumented config.xml options may help. This is for development of non m0n0wall software, but similar in spirit to what the article above is talking about.

So much to learn, so little time.

Wouldnt mind having a console server

I could really use a console server about now. My most important of edge routers have their failsafe menus accessible via serial port. I'd really like to be able to jump in and fix them remotely should the need arise.

Was reading This really cool report on how to make a console server using FreeBSD and the conserver package.

There are quite a few really neat four port PCI serial cards out there, including some with RJ45 jacks on the card itself, which makes it convenient for routing around a data room, because the final step is just a simple RJ45 to DB9 adapter.

photo © Darren Hester for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-NonCommercial