The object of this exercise is to create a bootable images that can be netbooted onto an Apple Airport base station, with the intent of using a pair of base stations as end nodes on a long-haul point-point link. The link to the actual project is found Here.
The starting point for this project was the netbootable diskless image created by Doug Ambrisko and Till Straumann. The link to this project is Here.
I did not want to depend on another host, except for booting. Hence the desire to run PicoBSD for this project. If you want to slave the Airport to a NFS server, see the link above.
The problems encountered were minimal, the most significant being the small (4mb) of memory on the Airport.
Due to the small amount of memory, and the requirement that the entire runtime image and MFS filesystem fit in 4mb, the resulting image is extremely stripped down, and includes only those utilities necessary to boot, configure ethernet, pccard, wavelan, and routing tables.
Since there is no non-voliatle storage on the airport (actually there is, see below.), it is necessary to recompile the picobsd kernel to change any configuration parameters within the image.
There is actually a bit of flash memory on the Airport, but it's quite small, and I have not yet tried to use it. It is used for the normal Airport (Karlbridge) code, which permits the airport to run as a normal access point if desired.
Other versions may be used, but 4.3-STABLE of mid-july 2001 is what I built with. In addition, 4.3-STABLE after 4 July 2001 provides support for configuring certain features (SSID, WEP key, WEP mode, Auth mode, channel, stationname) of the wi (lucent/orinoco/avaya wavelan 802.11), and an (cisco/aironet) cards. This means that you don't need to include wicontrol or ancontrol or both in the image. Due to kernel bloat, later versions may be too large for this project.