[H-GEN] NetBSD install.

[Jason Parker]

Hi.  This email doesn't contain any questions, or highly useful
information, but if you:

a) Bought a DEC from David Conran;
b) Like hearing these sorts of tales;

then sit down, and keep reading.

A large amount of this post will be comparing NetBSD to Linux, merely
because that's the only other unix I've installed---it's all I know.
My lasting impression this far is that NetBSD is a lot like the early
slackware distributions:  slightly buggy, and not as easy to install
as it could be, but you can see the potential.

(To clarify, I installed NetBSD-1.3_BETA pmax, if that makes any
difference.  I have a feeling that the i386 distribution may be a
little more polished, but I don't think so.)

The big gripe is that there are several sources of *slightly* disparate
instructions for installation.  In the end, I went to

ftp://ftp.questnet.net.au/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.3_BETA/pmax/INSTALL.gz

in Netscape, and installed by following the disk image instructions,
as I couldn't get the NFS to work..  :(  Ah well.  Of course, for this
I needed a disk to write to.  Hmm.  Image is about 30 meg, and there's
no floppy drive in this beast anyway.  Luckily I was able to use a 2G
SCSI drive I had bought, just for this purpose.  In the end, I had to:

   1.  Get the disk image, and disk labelling program to the Ultrix
       box.

   2.  Label the new 2G drive.  This really must be the only silent
       low-level disk utility I've seen.  It's certainly hard to tell
       if it's worked or not[1].

   3.  gunzip and dd the disk image to the newly created bsd
       filesystem on said disk.  I kept running out of space, until I
       gave up and chpt'd the disk to just one partition, 2G in size,
       or thereabouts.

   4.  Boot from said disk.  Not as easy as it sounds.  Hmm.
       "boot 3/rz6/netbsd"?  yeah, boots, but you can only install to
       rz0.  Rip the drive out, change scsi id, boot and *hope*.  If
       it hadn't booted at this point, he machine probably would have
       been quite difficult to recover, since the bootloader was
       pointing to a kernel just did not exist on the Ultrix drive.
       :(

   5.  For some reason I just can't fathom, the ftp installation
       doesn't trust you when you tell it where the gateways,
       nameservers, etc are.  It wants to *ping* them, for
       crissakes.  *sigh*  Off to the firewall rules, let pings from
       this host through, change it back.  *argh*

   6.  Oh, did I mention that for some strange reason, the ftp
       install makes a seperate connection for each tarball it
       fetches?  Weird.  Probably to keep the load down on NetBSD
       servers, I imagine.

   7.  The disk partitioning program *bites*, viz:

          a: change partition a.
          b: change partition b.
          c: change partition d.
          ....
          g: change partition h.

       All becase, (I think) BSD uses /dev/rz0c to refer to the
       *whole* of the first SCSI drive.  Madness.

   8.  All the packages come as tar.gz files.  :(  Urk.

Ah well, at least I have the source.  That's more than I can say for
Ultrix, which was dumped only because I couldn't get PPP support
compiled into the kernel.  (Ultrix seems to support kernel modules of
some sort.)  Oh, and licensing restricted me to only 4 logins[2].  :(

Jason
ph330812 at student.uq.edu.au

[1] : yes, yes.  I know that saying nothing on success is standard
      unix philosophy.  It did cause me a lot of grief though.

[2] : Said licensing `feature' is explained in a FAQ by a DEC
      employee.  Someone called `John Hall'.  Has anyone heard of
      him?

-----
ph330812 at student.uq.edu.au | NetHack addict^H^H^H^H^H^H player.
Ascended:  Priest(2), Valkyrie(1), and Caveman(1) Next:  Rogue.
/Real/ games run under *Unix*.  cf:  NetHack, Doom, Quake, etc.
Visit the One Meg Plan, at:  `finger nooks at azure.humbug.org.au'

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