xfer revision 1.2
1 $NetBSD: xfer,v 1.2 1998/01/09 18:48:00 perry Exp $ 2 3Installation is supported from several media types, including: 4 * Tape 5 * NFS 6 * Floppy 7 * FTP 8 9Note that installing on a "bare" machine requires some bootable 10device; either a tape or floppy drive or Sun-compatible NFS server 11with MOP capabilities. (Yes, NetBSD/vax uses the same netboot 12principles as Sun's does). 13 14The procedure for transferring the distribution sets onto 15installation media depends on the type of media. The most is up to 16you, depending what you want to install, but preferred are to do 17the installation over network as soon as the miniroot is installed. 18 19* Creating boot tapes: 20 21Fetch the two files from .../NetBSD-1.3/vax/tk50. Write them onto 22the tape, first file1 and then file2. Under Ultrix this is done 23just like this: 24 25 mt -f /dev/rmt0h rewind 26 dd if=tk50-file1-1.3 of=/dev/nrmt0h 27 dd if=tk50-file2-1.3 of=/dev/rmt0h 28 mt -f /dev/rmt0h rewoffl 29 30Under NetBSD this is done the same way, except for the tape name: 31 32 mt -f /dev/rmt8 rewind 33 dd if=tk50-file1-1.3 of=/dev/nrmt8 34 dd if=tk50-file2-1.3 of=/dev/rmt8 35 mt -f /dev/rmt8 rewoffl 36 37Of course, if you have another tape unit than 0 you have to use 38the corresponding unit number. 39 40If you are using any other OS to create bootable tapes, remember that 41the blocksize _must_ be 512 for the file to be bootable! Otherwise it 42just won't work. 43 44* Creating boot floppies: 45 46Fetch the files from .../NetBSD-1.3/vax/rx{50,33} depending of which 47floppy you have. There are three or seven files depending of the 48density of your floppies. Then just write the floppies using dd (under 49Unix, if you are creating floppies from DOS use some nice utility 50for that). There are one bootable floppy and a splitted miniroot image. 51 52* Booting from NFS server: 53 54All VAXen that can boot over network uses MOP, a DEC protocol. 55To be able to use MOP, a MOP daemon must be present on one of 56the machines on the local network. The boot principle is: 57 * The VS2000 broadcast a wish to load an image. 58 * A mopd answers and send the boot program to the VAX. 59 * The boot program does rarp requests, mounts the root filesystem 60 and loads the kernel. 61 * The kernel is loaded and starts executing. 62 63If your machine has a disk and network connection, it may be 64convenient for you to install NetBSD over the network. This 65involves temporarily booting your machine over NFS, just long enough 66so you can initialize its disk. This method requires that you have 67access to an NFS server on your network so you can configure it to 68support diskless boot for your machine. Configuring the NFS server 69is normally a task for a system administrator, and is not trivial. 70 71If you are using a NetBSD system as the boot-server, have a look at 72the diskless(8) manual page for guidelines on how to proceed with 73this. If the server runs another operating system, consult the 74documentation that came with it (i.e. add_client(8) on SunOS). 75 76You also must install a MOP loader. If you are booting from another 77NetBSD machine, MOP are included in the distribution, otherwise you 78may have to install a MOP loader. A loader can be found at 79ftp.stacken.kth.se:/pub/OS/NetBSD/mopd. Fetch the latest and read the 80installation instructions. 81 82The file that should be loaded are called boot and are located in 83.../NetBSD-1.3/vax/install. If you are not using the mopd written 84by Mats O Jansson (as the NetBSD are) then you should get the file 85boot.mopformat instead. 86 87The miniroot to start from is the one called miniroot.tar.gz located 88also in the install directory. Fetch it, unzip and untar it wherever 89you have your root filesystem. 90