self@ics.uci.edu (John Self) (02/08/91)
Does anyone have experience installing a MIPS RISC/os operating system
upgrade using a remote tape drive on a non-MIPS machine? I don't a
tape drive on my Magnum 3000 and I'm wondering how many problems I
will run into when 4.52 becomes available. So far I've had success
installing MIPS software packages by using tar to get them from a
remote system (a Sun SparcServer 4/330) which has a 150 Mb tape drive
attached. I've then do the other steps from the install script by
hand (e.g. running comply.) I think this will probably work for an OS
upgrade, but I wanted to see if anyone has tried this. This brings
up a few questions
1. If you've tried this were you successful?
2. Do you have a better way to do this? I don't want to buy a tape
drive just to do installs because I have many Suns with tape
drives, and my nightly backups are done on a remote Exabyte.
3. My other concern is hard disk failure. Without either a tape
drive or another diskfull MIPS how could I reload the OS in the
event of a serious disk failure? If I could get bfsd running on a
Sun I could do a remote tape install, but I don't have a source
license. The best thing I can think of is making a spare boot
partition and root on my other disk, but I can't find any
instructions on how to do this in my manuals. Any advice?
Thanks,
John Self
self@ics.uci.edu
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Thanks,
John