Re: Fail. Interrupt loop during install.

[Tom Ivar Helbekkmo <tih%hamartun.priv.no@localhost>]

Mark Kahrs <mark.kahrs%gmail.com@localhost> writes:

> http://world.std.com/~bdc/projects/vaxen/VAX-netboot-HOWTO.html
>
> That doesn't even exist.  Furthermore, if you go to the wayback
> machine, you'll see it hasn't been around for at least 10 years.

That's too bad.  I seem to recall it was a very good description, at
least of how to do it back then.  I haven't tried lately -- my VAXen are
too old for current NetBSD, so now I run 4.3BSD-Reno on them.

At least this gem is preserved in the archives for this list:

| From bdc%world.std.com@localhost Tue Jan 20 18:30:30 1998
| Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 03:05:58 -0500 (EST)
| From: Brian D Chase <bdc%world.std.com@localhost>
| To: NetBSD/VAX Mailing List <port-vax%NetBSD.ORG@localhost>
| Subject: Re: difference KA650-AA and KA650-BA
| 
| On Sun, 18 Jan 1998, Michael Sokolov wrote:
| 
| > But my second reaction is, why do you want to netboot in the first
| > place?!?! You have a tape drive!!  I personally find netbooting flawed
| > from the outset. Suppose that you live in a distant village in the
| > former Soviet Union and your VAX is the only computer in the radius of
| > two hundred kilometers. What are you going to netboot from? With a tape
| > drive, on the other hand, you should be able to buy (for a small fee
| > that's only for the tape, the software should be totally free) the
| > bootstrap tape from the group that distributes the OS, boot from it, and
| > run your solitary VAX! 
| 
| I present this alternative scenerio to defend the honour of my efforts to
| consolidate the netbooting information into a unified and readily
| digestible document:
| 
| Suppose you live in the outskirts of Moosejaw Canada.  It is deep winter
| and a severe blizzard has just passed through leaving behind in its icey
| wake more than 4ft (1.2m) of snow.  Physical access to civilization both
| to and from your remote location will be impossible for more than a month
| IF there are no further snowfalls. 
| 
| A day later while scavenging the forest in search of wood suitable for
| heating your cabin with, you stumble across the mauled remains of a DEC
| technician.  Obviously the tech's had some sort of misadventure with a
| hungry grizzly bear.  Clutched in what you can only guess to be his frozen
| arms is a VAXstation 3100 Model 38.  With the axe you'd been carrying to
| chop wood, you hack the tech's arms off in order to free the VAX. It is a
| hearty looking machine, though slightly blood-stained, which you believe
| you just might be able to salvage. Still you're not sure what you could
| possibly run as an OS on this serendipitous woodland booty.  Within the
| hour you return to the cabin, a few logs under one arm and the VAX under
| the other.
| 
| Once there you fire up your trusty 386 running NetBSD and browse around
| the net over your 33.6kbps modem connection to Moosejaw Online, the
| nearest ISP.  Using lynx, you hit the major search engines and discover
| that NetBSD/VAX will in fact run on the VAXstation you found (well, the
| technician was dead so who was to say who's VS3100 it was?)  Your first
| thought is to try and get it booted from floppy, but apparently bits of
| DEC tech cartilage and grizzly bear fur have gummed up the stepper motor
| in the floppy drive so it is unusable. 
| 
| Haha! But that's okay because in your browsing you have discovered the
| VAXstation Netbooting HOWTO on the web!  You scramble to find the junky
| old WD8003 8-bit ethernet card and thinnet strand which you know are
| buried in your computer scraps pile. You're lucky and find a pair of T
| connectors but alas no 50ohm terminators can be found.  Argh!  Sneakily,
| you eye your old transistor radio, a present you received on your 9th
| birthday from your beloved father. Reflecting back, you remember how a
| few days following that birthday your father fell through the ice of a
| nearby lake never to be found again -- not even when the snow melted in
| the spring.  Still, there's little sacred when it lay in the path of a
| hacker getting a VAX running.
| 
| Within a few minutes the radio was disassembled and four common 100ohm
| resistors had been extracted.  (There weren't any 50ohm resistors in the
| radio.)  You carefully wire two sets of the 100ohm resistors in parallel
| to create a 50ohm resistor.  Then you attach them to the ends of the T's
| on the thinnet strand.
| 
| Over the next few hours you manage to configure your NetBSD/i386 system as
| a bootserver by following the VAXstation Netboot HOWTO instructions.  An
| hour later and you've successfully MOP loaded the mopable bootloader!  You
| start your FTPing the latest NetBSD/VAX binary distribution.  Although
| it'll be many hours before the binary distribution is finished
| transferring to the 386, you know that complete success is close at hand. 
| Besides, you've got plenty of time to kill... I mean waste. 
| 
| Excited you burst through the door of the cabin into the bitingly cold
| night air.  Yelling towards the coal black heavens, "Thank goodness for
| netbooting as my floppy drive was gummed up with cartilage and grizzly
| bear fur!  Thank you.....!!!" <short pause> "Oh yeah, and I don't have a
| tape drive!" 
| 
| On a distant ridge, a pack of wolves howl.
| 
| -brian.
| ---
| Brian "JARAI" Chase | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ | VAXZilla LIVES!!!

-tih
-- 
Elections cannot be allowed to change anything.  --Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble