Greetings and Matriculations! (?)

>Brian Buhrow barked:

> Hello Don.
>My favorite way to do this, without using identical disks is to
>perform the following steps.  We assume here that you have a working
>machine running NetBSD which is of the same architecture as the
>machine you want to install.

Hmmm... presumably becasue you are copying a binary off of
the working system and onto the "target" system (in step 5)?

Would endian-ness screw things up (assume m68k <-> i386,
for example) if you tried to use dd(1)?  (I haven't yet explored
the "ENDIAN" option in the kernel...)

>1.  Boot the fresh system with the install cd or floppies.
>2.  Disklabel and newfs the hard disk on the system to taste.
>3.  Ifconfig and otherwise setup networking so that you're 
>able to exchange traffic with the working system.
>4.  Make sure rsh from the new system to the working system works.
>Use rsh <working> date to test.  You may have to edit /etc/hosts or
>/etc/resolv.conf on the system you're trying to install in order to
>get things working.


OK so far...

>5.  Copy /sbin/restore from the working system to your temporary 
>root drive.

Hmmm... at this point, isn't my / really MFS?
I'll have to verify restore is statically linked...

I assume I can just
   mount /dev/fd0a /mnt
   cp /mnt/restore /
   umount /mnt

Or, I guess I could copy it using ftp...?

>6.  Mount your newly newfsed disk on /mnt.
>7.  Create a symlink from /tmp to a new /tmp directory on your newly
>mounted /mnt partition.


Hmmm... why?  Oh, perhaps restore likes to scribble there
as a staging area?

>8.  Now run something like the following to do the transfer.
>
>cd /mnt
>rsh <working system> /sbin/dump f0 - /dev/rwd0a |</path/to/restore> rf -


I don't understand the role of "f0" arg to dump?  (sorry, I don't 
use it!)  <:-(

>If you have more than one filesystem on the working system that you
>want to clone, make sure you dump each one in turn.  Before you dump, be
>sure to cd to the directory on your new system where the filesystem was
>mounted on the working machine.  For example, if you have /usr on the
>working system, and it is a different filesystem from /, then cd /mnt/usr
>on your new system before running the dump |restore pipe as shown above.


I assume the file system(s) in question shoul dbe reasonably quiescent?

>9.  Run /usr/mdec/installboot on your new system, or whatever you need to
>do to make the disk bootable.
>10.  Edit /etc/fstab and make sure the disk partitions and names are
>correct.


Understood.

>Hope this helps.


Argh!   I'll *try* and see ho wbig a mess I make!  :-/
Perhaps I should archive a tarball to tape just to be safe... :>

Thx!
--don