So, as I was saying, having the CDROM on the same IDE channel as the hard disk is not working out so good. I just left the PC doing its thing and I will check up on it in the morning tomorrow. However, based on previous experience I am not expecting this to work so well. However, I noticed that the Dell will try to do a bootp/dhcp request if it can’t find any drives. This is interesting since now I may not need the CDROM at all.

Ubuntu has instructions on how to set up a bootpd server. Luckily, my FreeBSD box already has bootpd as part of the core installation. So between the man page and the documentation from Ubuntu, I should be able to do a net boot of the installation media. Slick.

It is too late and I’ve had enough wine tonight that I know better than to try it out, so I’ll probably give it a whirl tomorrow. Being sleepy and having wine does not lend itself to editing config files. This is the kind of thing that gets me excited; trying to figure this stuff out. At some point, I find this becomes more important than the actual end result. I’ll take it for a drive and report back.

• Preparing Files for TFTP Net Booting
• FreeBSD manpage for bootpd