On Wed, 4 Oct 95 11:43:17 EDT 
 "Gordon W. Ross" <gwr@mc.com> wrote:

 > I am working on a miniroot setup for the Sun3 port.  The first step
 > is something to partition the disk and install the miniroot in swap.
 > Instead of using a standalone program for that, I've come up with a
 > really small ramdisk kernel that can do the job.  The ramdisk setup
 > can copy the miniroot image from one of several sources:
 >   boot tape: (mt rewind; mt fsf 1; dd ...)
 >   NFS mount: (ifconfig ...; mount ...; dd...) *
 >   remote sh: (ifconfig ...; rsh server 'gzcat mroot.gz' | dd ...) *

Hmmm, very cool.  The standalone program was just what I though of first; 
I'm just used to tcopy from old HP-BSD tapes :-)

Also, the standalone program works from booting fron any possible media; 
tape, network, presumably disk (though, what's the point? :-)  I figured; 
I need a way to boot the miniroot anyhow, so why not use a boot-like 
program to install the miniroot?

 > Yeah, that's cool.  I wondered if there might be a way to use FTP
 > but not have to store the tar images locally.  Would this work?
 > 
 > 	# mkfifo /dev/pipe
 > 	# tar xfp /dev/pipe &
 > 	# ftp ...
 > 	ftp> get some_tar_image /dev/pipe
 > 
 > I haven't tried it with FTP yet...

Right, mne doesn't require storing the images locally.  In fact, to test 
it, I connected to ftp.NetBSD.ORG and installed 
{etc,dev,bin,sbin,var}.tar.gz from the last hp300 snapshot.  It was a 
little slow, but you can just let it run overnight.

They way I do FTP is install.sh emits an `ftp-script.sh' which:
	* cd's to the target directory
	* starts ftp
	* feeds ftp the proper commands

The install.sh program prompts for things like server IP, server path, 
login, password, and files.  It stores these responses as default answers 
in the event that you goof in the password or something, so you don't have 
to type it _all_ over again...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
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