On Mon, May 29, 2000 at 03:22:19AM -0700, Hal Murray wrote:

 > Can somebody give me a few hints/pointers on how to get from 1.4.2 
 > to -current when I'm on the other side of a firewall?

For your Alphas?  I have a solution!  :-)

I'm about to upload a new binary snapshot for NetBSD/alpha.  You should
be able to fetch it with passive FTP (the default mode of NetBSD's ftp(1)).

 > I'm interested in both i386 and alpha.  I think I'd be happy with  
 > recent snapshots if they included sources. 

I will upload source for my snapshots after I upload the alpha binaries.  I
also uploaded an i386 binary snapshot yesterday.

Give me a chance to get rid of the obj.{i386,alpha} directories, then
I'll tar up the source and u/l it.

 > The machines I'm interested in won't run a stock kernel - they run 
 > out of mbufs because I have too many network devices.  I could yank 
 > some boards and get started by installing a snapshot, but that's 
 > a pain-in-the-ass that I'd rather avoid and I still need the kernel 
 > sources to build a useful kernel. 

For the install process, the new kernels don't allocate receive buffers
until you ifconfig the interfaces up.  Also, on the Alpha, you can increase
the number of mbuf clusters on the fly with sysctl:

frau-farbissina:thorpej 320$ sudo sysctl -w kern.mbuf.nmbclusters=2048
kern.mbuf.nmbclusters: 256 -> 2048
frau-farbissina:thorpej 321$ 

Sorry, can't do this on i386 because it doesn't have a KSEG.

Do do the update, at least on i386, you're doing a a.out->ELF transition.
It might be easier to just use the `upgrade' feature of the install tool.

-- 
        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@zembu.com>