FAUCONNE@FRSIM51.BITNET (10/26/89)
Thanks so much to all of you (actually many!) who answered to my
previous question concerning the installation of Common Lisp.
The beginner Sun system manager strikes again. I have two more
questions for you Sun wizards. I RTFM and I couldn't find the answers.
I have a Sparcstation I with a small disk booting as a diskless client
(for now, I'll figure out how to use the local disk later) on a Sun
4/110 with a 330 Mb external SCSCI disk configured as an heterogenous
server (sun4c isn't exactly sun4, right ?). I'm running SunOS 4.0.3c.
The first question is: is there a way to have an unattended boot on the
client SparcStation ? I only managed to correctly boot it by typing:
ok boot le()vmunix -a
and answering to the various questions regarding file systems (most of
the time hitting CR is enough but I have to specify "nfs" a couple of
times). I eventually get the login prompt and a `cat /etc/mtab'
confirms that the filesystems have been mounted as expected. If I try:
ok boot le() (or if I leave the machine auto-boot)
the machine starts to boot smoothly (SunOS banner appears, NFS
filesystems found OK) but at some point in the boot it stops, and
complains about a recalibrate failure on fd0. Not surprising. We don't
have a floppy disk drive. It then asks for the root file system (either
fd%da or sd%da). I have to abort it. I checked that /etc/bootparams,
/export/root/clientname/etc/fstab are correct (they all refer to the
exported filesystems on the server) so why on earth does the machine
try to set up a root filesystem on a local disk although it appears to
find them remotely during the early stages of the boot ?
Here's another one. I installed SunLink DNI 6.0 on the server. It runs OK
but now I want to have it running on the client SparcStation. The DNI
installation guide states on some page that I have to rebuild a kernel
for the client machine by invoking dni_install. So far, so good. The
problem is it only makes sense to me to build it on the target
machine but I can't (first of all the /usr filesystem is mounted ro on
the client machine!). Actually the sun_install script doesn't seem to
know anything about the sun4c architecture. I got really confused when I
read on some other page of the installation guide that I should *not* run
dni_install for the client nodes (how will the new kernel be
built?) but instead only dni_rc_inst. I'm stuck for now so if anybody
can help...
Sorry to use up the network bandwidth with so naive questions. I
promise that when I become a Sun wizard I will help my fellow Sun
beginners :-)
Regards -- Alain (VMS SysMgr lost in an Un*x world)
<fauconne@frsim51.bitnet>