On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, John Klos wrote:

> Just to be clear: the sysinst program is the same thing that netbsd-i386
> and others use? Does it work like the Amiga installer where you dd it into
> a swap partition and boot it?

You could do that, but all you need to do is to copy it into the
Booter's folder, check "Boot from Mac OS file", and type in the
filename. You could also copy it into /, and make "/netbsd" a hard
link to it, assuming that the Booter and Mac OS are set to boot from
"netbsd".

> I'd like to try out the sysinst program, but I am curious about another
> option: I'd like to figure out how to upgrade a system from 1.4.2 to 1.5
> without physical access to it.
> 
> The reason is that I have decked out Amiga running NetBSD 1.4.2 that's
> colocated, with somewhere around 50 virtual domains and just as many
> users; I'd love to be able to do the upgrade quickly, while there's the
> least usage (like 3:00am), and perhaps without physical access to the
> machine.
> 
> So to test how, I've set up two Quadra 800s (about which I've posted
> before), one with NetBSD 1.4.2 and one with 1.5; I already have all of my
> configuration files set to go for 1.5, and I'm wondering if the following
> is possible:
> 
> (1) bring the 1.4.2 system into single user mode; could I then run sysinst
> over the network?

Won't you need access to the console to access the menus? If you
already have network access to the serial console, it could work.

> or, (2) bring it into single user, untargzip all of the binary sets for
> 1.5 over the 1.4.2 stuff (making sure I still have basic tools like tar,
> sh, gzip, et cetera), replace the kernel, then reboot?

Messy. You'll likely have some core dumps scattered about. It may not
even shut down cleanly. Slightly better might be to boot from the new
kernel *first*, realizing that ipnat and some other things will not
work, then untar the binaries. One thing that sysinstall gives you,
that this technique and the Mac OS install don't, is that sysinstall
will remove some obsolete files, so if you do what you describe, you
need to take care to remove old includes, and old system binaries that
have moved (but leave any old shared libraries that have different
major numbers than the new ones, so you can run your old locally
compiled binaries.)


Frederick