[1059] in SIPB_Linux_Development
Re: Hand-modifications to make Linux-Athena work?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Erik Nygren)
Sat Sep 16 13:00:45 1995
To: Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>
Cc: linux-dev@MIT.EDU, linux-help@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 15 Sep 1995 21:31:00 EDT."
<199509160131.VAA22083@toxicwaste.media.mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 1995 12:58:58 -0400
From: Erik Nygren <nygren@MIT.EDU>
> start xlogin by default (modify /etc/inittab)
This may not be totally desirable to do automatically.
Configuring X is still one of the pains of Linux and NetBSD
installation. Having it try starting X using dm
before you've configured stuff would be very messy.
Also, many people without lots of memory may prefer
to not run X at all. Probably the best thing
to do would be to put the line into the file but
don't modify the initial runlevel. That way
people only have one number to change to get
Athena xlogin to work.
> Create /etc/rc.d/rc.local which:
> sets time ("gettime -s kerberos")
> starts zhm
> starts AFS
It'd make more sense, IMHO, to have a /etc/rd.d/rc.athena
script which gets sourced from rc.local. Here's the contents
of mine although you may want to change some of this:
---------------------- CUT HERE --------------------
#!/bin/sh
# Athena boot startup script for use with Linux
#Constants.
ATHENA="/usr/athena"
# Start the Zephyr[tm] host manager
if [ -f ${ATHENA}/etc/zhm ]
then
echo -n " zhm"
if [ -f ${ATHENA}/etc/zhm.pid ]
then
rm -f ${ATHENA}/etc/zhm.pid
fi
${ATHENA}/etc/zhm &
fi
# Get the time
if [ -f ${ATHENA}/etc/gettime ]
then
echo -n ' gettime '
echo "("`${ATHENA}/etc/gettime -s time.mit.edu`")"
echo -n
fi
# Start AFS
# Remove the AFS cache files if you're paranoid to avoid problems
# with cache corruption
echo -n "Removing afs cache files... "
rm -f /v/vice/cache/*
echo done.
if [ -f /etc/rc.d/rc.afs ]
then
echo "Starting AFS..."
source /etc/rc.d/rc.afs
fi
# Remove NFS volumes from attachtab
# The better way to do this would probably be to just fix attach
ATTACHTAB=/var/tmp/attachtab
if [ -f $ATTACHTAB ]
then
/usr/bin/grep -v "+NFS " ${ATTACHTAB} >${ATTACHTAB}.new
/bin/mv -f ${ATTACHTAB}.new ${ATTACHTAB}
fi
---------------------- CUT HERE --------------------
> What am I missing? If you can think of any other modification that
> you needed to hand-make to your Linux-Athena installation to make it
> work, please send me email.
It would be nice to put this into a Slackware package so that
when using pkgtool to install Linux-Athena, all this would get
done automatically. At some point we could then put the
whole Athena package system into the Slackware tree here and
have people just install the Athena stuff when they
install everything else.
You should have some questions which ask users what level of
Athena-ization they want to have. Keep in mind that some
users may want to have Athena stuff but use PPP to
dial up when they want to be connected to the net (and so
won't be netted at bootup). Users should also have some
level of control over how much reactivate does. In the
case of a private machine in someone's dorm or a machine
which people log into from remote, the default reactivate
looks like it will do evil things.
One possibility is to have a directory of configuration
options (files containing either yes or no) and have
checkconfig and setconfig scripts which query and modify
these files. Scripts can then use checkconfig to determine
whether to enable certain options. (This would make enabling
and disabling features quite easy and is how SGI does it).
It would also be nice to put AFS into a package that installed
it easily. If we're going to do this we should also have some
precompiled 1.2.13 kernels with ModVersioning support and
needed drivers so people won't always have to recompile
the kernel.
> My hope is to generate a script that will perform all the necessary
> tweaking to get Linux-Athena to work. In this way, Linux-Athena
> installation will hopefully be much easier in the future.
Thanks for your help in setting this up. One of the advantages NetBSD
still has is that it gives you Athena more out-of-the-box than Linux
does. As far as I can tell, Linux has the advantage (at MIT) of
having more functionality for people who don't have real net
connections or people who want to keep more stuff locally on their
machines. (Although I wouldn't mind being able to install updates
and other things easier, I don't want some script turning my machine
into a public cluster machine entirely dependant on AFS and on the
net being up. :-)
--- Erik
