J R Gasser wrote:
> 
> 
> Here are a number of questions, most of which could be resolved by
> several (?many?) hours studying the man pages and Howtos and FAQs.  I
> am hoping that it's OK to post for a quick solution to save a lot of
> time as I want to get a 1.3 system up as soon as possible, my goal is
> not to learn as much as possible about system administration.

Well....the FAQ is there for a reason, but fortunately, many of your
questions aren't in there quite yet (although they will be soon).
 
> FIRST QUESTION
> 
> There have been a number of postings like the following:
> 
>         I'm trying to upgrade my IIcx running 1.2.1 to 1.3, but can't get the new
>         kernel to boot. It appears to hang up at the adb keyboard test(?) and
>         requires a hard boot to recover. The display below (which I've typed, but I
>         believe is accurate) tells the whole story. Any advice?
> 
> 
> Should I wait before installing 1.3 until this is sorted or go ahead
> anyway?  And if I go ahead, what kernal do I use (or is this
> self-explanatory once I have the documentation to 1.3)?

There are 2 immediate solutions (and 1 longer term solution) to this
problem:

1) Boot with a standard keyboard, not an extended keyboard if using the
   NetBSD 1.3 distribution kernel, and make sure you have a mouse attached
   as well
2) Use a HWDIRECT kernel instead of the NetBSD 1.3 release kernel:

ftp://ftp.macbsd.com/pub/NetBSD/eskimo.copy/kernels/netbsd.HWDIRECT-56.tar.gz

should work, although the SBC version might be better.  I've got patch for
the normal kernel sources that seems to also work around this little
problem.

> QUESTION TWO
> 
> I have PPP workingbut not routing.  (thanks to a website someone has
> posted, can't find the URL to offer thanks here) i.e. I can dial up
> and log in to my ISP (fortunately they give me a fixed internet
> number).  I can ping the comms gateway machine that is answering me
> but without routing I obviously don't get beyond that one machine.
> 
> Clearly one fix is to list every site I want to access in /etc/hosts
> (as all I want to do right now is upgrade to 1.3 that is feasible but
> ugly)  Can someone give me a hand if there is a better quick fix.  It
> is all in the man pages I know, but I want to just do this and not
> necessarily spend time studying the problem.  I am familiar with all
> the usual stuff of setting up Internet access for Microsoft Windows so
> brief technical answers or simply sample files would be enough.

What does 'netstat -r' show?  It sounds like you need to add the
"defaultroute" option to your ppp command.  All you should need is the
default route to your gateway, and everything else should work just fine,
assuming you have /etc/resolv.conf setup correctly, that is.
 
> QUESTION THREE
> 
> I am less than clear on how to load a newer booter (I have v1.1) as it
> seems that I need a newer version for BSD1.3  Is there a Howto on
> getting a booter in to the Mac-OS for those who don't know about Macs?
> I assume that I can download a compressed binary under BSD1.1 and then
> get it into the Mac part of the system somehow, maybe this is wrong.

Do you have PPP connectivity under MacOS?  If so, download it under MacOS.
If not, do you have the MacOS Installer utility on that machine?  If so,
you can download the new Booter under NetBSD and then use the Installer to
copy it out to the MacOS partition.
 
> QUESTION FOUR
> 
> I haven't seen much about BSD1.1 anywhere, is it right to assume that
> the "update from 1.2 to 1.3 within NetBSD" instructions should hold
> good for a jump from 1.1 to 1.3 or are there specific things to watch.

It should be relatively similar.  It's been a few years since I used
NetBSD 1.1, so there might be some other gotchas, but the basic idea is to
save the files in /etc that you have configured how you want, and then
install the 1.3 distribution over everything else (i.e. follow the upgrade
instructions).

> QUESTION FIVE
> 
> Caps lock isn't working on the keyboard at present, is going to 1.3
> likely to solve this (annoying but not totally crucial....).

This sounds vaguely familiar...what kind of keyboard is it?  Does the
capslock key work under MacOS?  If the 1.3 upgrade doesn't fix it, please
let us know so we can dig into it.

> QUESTION  SIX
> 
> Like for many users 'shutdown' doesn't work cleanly for me.  However
> 'halt' not only closes down the system nicely and then powers off the
> computer, it also wakes it up a couple of seconds later and reboots.
> I didn't see (late last night) a parameter to add to halt to get it to
> NOT reboot, is there one and I missed something obvious.

Wow, that's pretty screwy.  I've never had "halt" reboot on me...perhaps
this is a symptom of the same problem.  It's possible that the 1.3 upgrade
will fix this problem since the 1.3 kernel is a different size, and this
seems to be a determining factor in whether or not this problem will
affect you.

I hope this helps some.  Please let us know if you have further questions.

Later.

-- 
Colin Wood                                 cwood@ichips.intel.com
Component Design Engineer - MD6                 Intel Corporation
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I speak only on my own behalf, not for my employer.