[3184] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Etherboot floppy trashes GX150 EEPROM!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Sun Mar 24 00:45:22 2002
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Bill Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>
Cc: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@mit.edu>, owls@mit.edu, release-team@mit.edu,
kcr@mit.edu, tb@mit.edu, linux-dev@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.30L.0203231804050.5717-100000@tokata.mit.edu>
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Date: 24 Mar 2002 00:45:14 -0500
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On Sat, 2002-03-23 at 18:06, Bill Cattey wrote:
> I checked with ghudson to verify when vortex-diag is run.
> He set it up to happen only when one does the update.
> This means that if we install at 9.0.25, it won't run.
> (Not a problem for now.)
Sorry to have misled you. What I said is true in the normal case (that
is, for a machine installed before 9.0.25, "vortex-diag -w" gets run
once when the machine upgrades to 9.0.25 or higher, and under normal
circumstances it doesn't get run again), but it's still a
simplification. Here is the exact situation:
vortex-diag gets run by the athena-ws post-install script. We only run
it with the "-w" option if running it without the -w option indicates
that values need to be set. (That way we don't do lots of unnecessary
EEPROM writes.)
This means:
* When a machine is installed, vortex-diag -w will be run if necessary
when the athena-ws RPM is installed.
* Even after a machine is installed/updated to 9.0.25, vortex-diag -w
will be run if necessary whenever the athena-ws RPM is upgraded.
> The case I'm worried about is if people run the floppy we've been
> distributing all this time, with them and us both having thought
> that nothing bad ever happens if you quit before giving the first
> IP address.
This unusual situation will repair itself the next time the athena-ws
RPM is upgraded. Which could be a long time, of course. We should
certainly remove that code from the etherboot floppy to make the
situation even more unusual.
