[1201] in NetBSD-Development
Some notes from a 1.1 install
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (nathanw@MIT.EDU)
Sun Jan 21 11:33:32 1996
From: nathanw@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 1996 11:32:58 -0500
To: netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU
I just installed NetBSD 1.1 on yam-yak.mit.edu, one of pika's
cluster machines, with (so far) successful results. I have a few notes
on the install procedure and the installed system that I would like to
share.
The install procedure went very smoothly; I have few
complaints. One notable difference was that the install was quite slow
from this end of the frame relay. I timed it; the entire install took
about two hours. Of that, 90 minutes was in the part currently labeled
as "this will take about 10 minutes", from installing the base pack to
copying over the kernel. I expect 90 minutes to be the minimum time
for this section, given that I tested it at an hour when network load
was otherwise very light. Notably, NFS performance over the frame
relay network peaks at about 4Kb/s, while FTP is often 50% faster. It
may be too late in the development cycle to make the install procedure
use FTP, but it could easily shave half an hour off of installations
in ILG's.
I would have liked it if the configuration mail that can be
sent could be cc'd to root at the local machine, or allow for giving
some other address.
The end of the install script could mention removing the
floppy once more before rebooting.
I'm not sure when the boot manager can be installed; will it
work if space has been cleared for NetBSD but no partition exists
for it? I dealt by booting to DOS and installing the boot manager
after NetBSD had been installed.
About the installed system:
The default umask for root is 0; this strikes me as too generous. In a
similar vein of paranoia, we may wish to mention the desirablilty of
getting a srvtab for protected access to the machine.
There is some minor disagreement with the documentation
(revision 1.20 of /afs/sipb/project/doc/netbsd) ; the last part of
step 5 is to turn on the line in /etc/ttys that runs /etc/athena/dm.
Lots of terminal lines follow that line on the installed system.
I noticed that procfs and kernfs weren't mounted; since the
Athena customizations had mentioned them, it seemed odd. Digging
deeper, the part of athena-inst that deals with these entries looks
like:
if grep -q kernfs /mnt/etc/fstab; then
mkdir -p -m 755 /mnt/kern /mnt/proc
cat /usr/distrib/fstab.add >>/mnt/etc/fstab
fi
Shouldn't that grep be grep -v, so that it installs the entries in
fstab if they aren't already installed?
There are still a couple of problems that I need to solve. The
machine has three serial ports, and NetBSD only finds two, and the one
that isn't the mouse doesn't seem to work (attached to a VT220). The
bigger problem is that NetBSD's NFS client doesn't seem to work with a
Linux NFS server; I get 'stale file handle' errors immediately upon
mounting the filesystem.
Overall, it was a painless install; we'll soon find out how
the users deal with it.
- Nathan
