Hi, On Mar 23, 2013, at 3:26 PM, Andrew Smallshaw wrote:
On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 06:17:32PM -0400, Al wrote:What I would like to be able to do is do an install on either another drive or on an NFS partition. Then chroot to it and then delete the files that are on /, /var, and /usr and then do a clean install of NetBSD. Is this possible? If it is, could someone give me a how to on doing something like this?There are various ways of doing this of differing degrees of peril so a little more background would be useful. What out of band managment do you have in any? i.e. do you have a serial console or IP KVM? What kind of machine is it and does it have any lights-out management toys? If you do have at least a remote console of whatever description I'd be thinking in terms of installing a install image of some description to a spare partition (e.g. your swap slice).
It does not have a serial console, IP KVM, or lights-out management.
If your only way of controlling the machine is over the network into the machine itself you are probably looking at some form of in-place sleight of hand and treading on eggshells since one little mistake can easily lose your network connectivity and ability to control the machine with it. That doesn't make it impossible but it does mean everything needs double checking and ideally testing on a local machine before you do it.
It looks like this is the only way to do it. I tested it on a local machine and I was able to do what looks like a fresh install of NetBSD 5.1.2 on a NetBSD 6 system by untarring the kernel, base.tgz, and etc.tgz on an nfs. I then updated the etc files, then "cd /mnt/ dev' ran '/bin/sh MAKEDEV all'. After that I ran 'find . -exec touch - u -t todays date {}\;'. I then tarred it. I then went on to the old install and ran 'find . -exec touch -u -t 20091212000000 {} \;'. and untarred that file in /. After that I did 'find / -mtime 2 -delete' I then ran 'pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master' and ran '/bin/sh MAKEDEV all' again this time in /dev. I then rebooted into NetBSD 5.1.2 and was able to ssh in. I must say that it is sure a risky way to do it, and could end in an unusable system.
Best Regards, Al