New Year's changes in UltraPenguin 1.1.9 [testers welcome]

New Year's changes in UltraPenguin 1.1.9 [testers welcome]

[Jakub Jelinek]

Hi!

UltraPenguin 1.1.9 has undergone following changes:

- Updated to kernel 2.2.0-pre4 vger, where a bunch of things should be fixed,
  such as Qlogic ISP/PTI SBUS driver on sparc32 (I'm too tired now to actually
  look at what those changes were and don't remember them, so if you want
  look them up yourselves).
- Updated modutils, so that they never start kerneld with new kernels
  (this was ok in rc.sysinit, but apparently /etc/rc.d/init.d/kerneld
  was not checking it).
- SCSI Tape Install method: this is a shiny new installation method.
  In images you have tapeboot.img, which you can just dd to a tape
  and boot tape. But if you do that, you have to install off the network,
  or local hd, or CD. But you can also use utils/maketape script (e.g.

  /ftp/ultrapenguin-1.1.9/sparc/utils/maketape /dev/nst0 /ftp/ultrapenguin-1.1.9/sparc/

  which will create a bootable tape with which you can then select
  Local SCSI Tape install. I've tested it on SS20 with Sun DLT, but I hope
  it will run elsewhere as well. I'm looking for feedback about this.
- utils/maketftpsymlink can help you in setting up tftp server.
  Either you run e.g.

  utils/maketftpsymlink -p penguin.mynet.org sun4u

  which will show you the IPINHEX (and possible .SUNX extension) name
  of the symlink you should do in /tftpboot, or, if your tftp server runs
  Linux, you can try

  utils/maketftpsymlink sparc.penguin.com sun4m 08:00:20:de:ad:be

  and the script will lead you through the process of setting everything up.
  I wanted to keep all the control on the administrator, so the script
  as soon as it finds some thing not prepared yet (with the exception of 
  making the symlink in /tftpboot and adding the host into rarp/arp tables),
  it will tell you what's the problem and exit. You can then fix it and
  rerun the script.
  If you'd like a script which will take care of everything automagically,
  let me know.
- As space in ramdisk.img went tight, I also merged /sbin/install and
  /sbin/install2 programs on the sparc into one, which saved a lot of space.

Please let me know if some problems are still remaining with the
distribution. Sorry if I've missed your bug report or mail, if you can,
resend it now if it is still valid.

Cheers,
    Jakub
___________________________________________________________________
Jakub Jelinek | jj@sunsite.mff.cuni.cz | http://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz
Administrator of SunSITE Czech Republic, MFF, Charles University
___________________________________________________________________
UltraLinux  |  http://ultra.linux.cz/  |  http://ultra.penguin.cz/
Linux version 2.2.0-pre4 on a sparc64 machine (3958.37 BogoMips)
___________________________________________________________________

Re: New Year's changes in UltraPenguin 1.1.9 [testers welcome]

[Edwin Kremer]

On Wed, Jan 06, 1999 at 01:28:57AM +0100, Jakub Jelinek wrote:

  : UltraPenguin 1.1.9 has undergone following changes:

Thanks. Our mirror (Utrecht, the Netherlands) is now in sync and with
the SRPMS this time:

	ftp://ftp.cs.uu.nl/mirror/Linux/UltraPenguin/ultrapenguin-1.1.9/
	http://www.cs.uu.nl/mirror/Linux/UltraPenguin/ultrapenguin-1.1.9/


The UP1.2 release won't happen prior to official kernel 2.2 release, I guess?


Best regards,

-- 
Edwin H. Kremer, systems- and network administrator.          <edwin@cs.uu.nl>
Dept. of Computer Science,  Utrecht University, The Netherlands  [WHOIS: ehk3]
-------------------- http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/edwin/ -----------------------

Re: New Year's changes in UltraPenguin 1.1.9 [testers welcome]

[Roger J. Allen]

On Wed, 6 Jan 1999, Jakub Jelinek wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> UltraPenguin 1.1.9 has undergone following changes:
> 

> - SCSI Tape Install method: this is a shiny new installation method.
>   In images you have tapeboot.img, which you can just dd to a tape
>   and boot tape. But if you do that, you have to install off the network,
>   or local hd, or CD. But you can also use utils/maketape script (e.g.
> 
>   /ftp/ultrapenguin-1.1.9/sparc/utils/maketape /dev/nst0 /ftp/ultrapenguin-1.1.9/sparc/
> 
>   which will create a bootable tape with which you can then select
>   Local SCSI Tape install. I've tested it on SS20 with Sun DLT, but I hope
>   it will run elsewhere as well. I'm looking for feedback about this.

It looks like my tape drive needs a different block size.  The maketape
script is using dd without a block size, so I think it defaults to 512
bytes.  With the latest ultrapenguin 1.1.9 (2.2.0-pre4) on an Ultra1
170E and an Exabyte 8505XLE, "mt -f /dev/nst0 status" shows a tape block
size of 1024 bytes on a new tape.

When I ran maketape, I got an error like:

dd: /dev/nst0: Input/output error

After running "mt -f /dev/nst0 setblk 512", maketape was able to create
the tape.  It took about 130 minutes to finish.  Booting from tape was
ok until after it rewound the tape and tried to "Find installation
files".  Control-Alt-F4 showed:

<4>Detected scsi tape st0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 4, lun 0
<5>st0: Incorrect block size

Control-Alt-F3 had:

* running: /bin/insmod /bin/insmod /modules/st.o
* status fileno 0 blkno 0
* status fileno 1 blkno 0
* could not read from tape: Input/output error

After rebooting and changing the maketape dd commands to use "bs\x1024",
it was not necessary to set the tape block size.  It only took 15
minutes to create the tape.  That tape was able to boot and upgrade
UP-1.1.9 (it upgraded basesystem-4.9).  It also was able to boot and
perform a complete install.

So, changing dd to use the same block size as the default for my
hardware was all that the maketape script needed.

I am guessing that the installation program rewinds the tape, but it
does not set the tape block size before it tries to "Find installation
files".  Maybe changing maketape to set the tape block size and also
changing the installation program to set the tape block size after
rewinding the tape would work if other tape drives have the same problem
as mine.

Another thing, while the maketape script doesn't cause errors under
Solaris 2.6, the xargs puts nine different copies of the three base
files interspersed thru the archive.  I don't know if this will mess up
the installation program, because that tape was using the 512 byte block
size.  The tape did boot, but could not "Find installation files".

-- 
Roger J. Allen                Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center
System Administrator                                   Chicago,  IL   USA
Surgical Information Systems                       Voice:  (312)-942-4825
Internet: rja@sis.rpslmc.edu                         FAX:  (312)-733-6921