Howdy...

My roommate has graced our apartment with a beautiful sun 3/60.  Since I am the
local sysadmin type, I've been "contracted" get an OS on the thing and get it
on our network.

I'm a newbie in the sense that, while I know my way around Solaris 2.x, Irix 
and Linux fairly well, this is the first time I have attempted NetBSD on any
platform.  It's also the first time that I have ever had to touch the sun3
architecture.

The machine currently has no OS.  I get my daily fill of NIS at work and I 
don't want to have to touch it at home, so putting SunOS on the sucker is 
right out.  

So I pulled the 1.1 sun3 binaries from my local mirror and read the install
guide.  I have a 1/4" tape drive hooked to the 3/60, so I decided that a tape
load would be in order.  The other machine that I have access to with a 1/4"
tape drive is a Sparc 1+ at work running Solaris 2.4.  I attempted to make my
boot tape with the following script, which is almost straight out of the
install guide.

#!/bin/sh
 
# Here is a generic script that makes a Sun3 boot tape
# using the files in this directory.
 
T=/dev/rmt/0n
set -x
 
# Make sure we start at the beginning.
mt -f $T rewind
 
# Segment 1 is the tapeboot program.
dd if=tapeboot of=$T bs=8k conv=sync
mt -f $T weof
 
# Segment 2 is the ramdisk kernel.
gzip -d < netbsd-rd.gz |dd of=$T bs=8k conv=sync
mt -f $T weof
 
# Segment 3 is the miniroot image, unzipped!
gzip -d < miniroot.gz |dd of=$T bs=8k
mt -f $T weof
 
# Done!
mt -f $T rewind

Didn't work.  The 3/60 attempted to load off the tape, but quit quickly with
data faults.  I tried rebuilding the boot tape without explicitly setting the
EOF markers, but that didn't help.

So I am stuck on the tape load...I never was really all that good with the
various options to dd and, due to my lack of experience with the architecture,
I don't know what the 3/60 is expecting.

If I can't get the tape load to go, then my only option will have to be via
NFS, but that opens up its own little can of worms.  The other machines on my
network are x86 boxes running Linux and I've never attempted to set a Linux box
up as a boot server.  So, I guess that I am looking for advice on how to get
the tape load to fly.  Any thoughts, or am I just hopeless?

Thanks in advance...

PeeWee

-- 
"my visions have gone far away from this place, they've dissolved" sbld sympny
http://www.zerby.com/peewee  WORK jwright@netrex.com PERSONAL peewee@zerby.com
"....and stop stomping around like that so much!!"   --Deanna Yow, on 12/18/95