scl@sasha.acc.Virginia.EDU (Steve Losen) (05/17/91)
I'm having trouble setting up a RS/6000 as a boot server for a diskless sun 3/50. To further complicate matters, I am turning the 3/50 into an X terminal using the xkernel package (which is essentially instructions for configuring a very stripped down SunOS kernel and booting it up to run one process -- the MIT X11.4 server). I have succeeded in getting xkernel to work on this 3/50 using a sun as a boot server, but I'm having trouble with the RS/6000. The kernel boots fine and it sucessfully NFS mounts / and /usr, but when it fires up the X server, the X server cannot open or ioctl /dev/fb. I tried some other stuff and and ld.so had similar trouble with /dev/zero. When I set up the RS/6000 as a server I had to run MAKEDEV on the RS/6000 to make all the devices in the diskless sun's /dev. (I couldn't get tar or cpio to make them from my original xkernel tree on the sun server). When I compare the diskless /dev on the sun server with RS/6000 I have the same files with the same major/minor numbers. Some owners and groups are different, but I attribute that to different group/gid and loginid/uid associations on the two machines. I am using a RS/6000 540 running AIX 3.1 3003.0018 I have exported the diskless root tree read/write with access= and root= set to the diskless sun. It looks to me like the RS/6000 NFS server is somehow making the /dev files unusable on the sun. Before starting up the X server, the diskless sun successfully runs ifconfig, hostname, route, and mount. I don't know if any of these commands use anything in /dev. Does this sort of problem ring a bell with anyone else out there? -- Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu University of Virginia Academic Computing Center