Subject: sun-lamp CVS commits
To: None <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov, kenh@cmf.nrl.navy.mil>
From: Gordon W. Ross <gwr@mc.com>
List: current-users
Date: 10/04/1995 11:43:17
> From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
> Date: Wed, 04 Oct 1995 01:34:15 -0700
[ Ken asks if the new installation stuff will work in other ports? ]
> It could be easily adapted to other ports, yes. [...]
> I personally like the miniroot approach, and don't see any reason why it
> couldn't be used on the i386, even. The hp300's 5mb miniroot might take
> a while to dump to disk over the network (there's a standalone program,
> SYS_INST, that labels the boot disk, copies miniroot from NFS server,
> boots miniroot), but it has lots of regular tools that make getting the
> installation task done a lot easier (like vi(1), for example).
>
> You might find it interesting to just take a look at that stuff ...
> adaptability was in mind when I wrote it, and I know of at least one
> person who is considering using it for another port...I'll let him speak
> up if he wants...
I am working on a miniroot setup for the Sun3 port. The first step
is something to partition the disk and install the miniroot in swap.
Instead of using a standalone program for that, I've come up with a
really small ramdisk kernel that can do the job. The ramdisk setup
can copy the miniroot image from one of several sources:
boot tape: (mt rewind; mt fsf 1; dd ...)
NFS mount: (ifconfig ...; mount ...; dd...) *
remote sh: (ifconfig ...; rsh server 'gzcat mroot.gz' | dd ...) *
I too like the miniroot approach. Once you have it loaded you can
boot up single-user with a fairly complete set of tools available.
> I must say, out of all of the above installation options, FTP is by far
> my favorite ... For people who have access to a network, all you need is
> to d/l the miniroot media, and connect to ftp.NetBSD.ORG or a mirror for
> the actual distribution :-) (Ok, well I haven't tested _that_ part yet,
> but it's sure nifty on my little network at home! :-)
Yeah, that's cool. I wondered if there might be a way to use FTP
but not have to store the tar images locally. Would this work?
# mkfifo /dev/pipe
# tar xfp /dev/pipe &
# ftp ...
ftp> get some_tar_image /dev/pipe
I haven't tried it with FTP yet...
Gordon