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Re: problem installing a domU



On 12/08/2009 1:40 AM, Steven Bellovin wrote:

On Aug 11, 2009, at 10:25 AM, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 08:22:15AM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

The official how-to just says

load the netbsd-INSTALL_XEN3_DOMU kernel provided in the NetBSD
binary sets. Like others install kernels, it contains a ramdisk
with sysinst, so you can install NetBSD using sysinst on your
new domain

In other words, it's broken like almost all "howto" documentation is
broken: it says "how to" but not "why to", which lets even well informed
and capable people jump to conclusions and waste a bunch of their time.

Yup...

The wiki says

This configuration uses a DOMU_INSTALL kernel and an ISO image
provided by a successful 'build release' and 'build iso-image'.
You may be able to locate a valid Xen3 DOMU_INSTALL kernel from
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/ but if not, building a
release is your best bet.

The wiki has essentially no quality control, is not an official TNF
service, and, like many wikis, is consequently full of
misinformation scattered at random among information that is mostly
right.

It's actually more up-to-date than the official how-to, especially about
not using grub...

That vague paragraph was my doing and documented from my process, I was trying to keep it simple by excluding more complex ways of generating a kernel. At the time there was no valid documentation for Xen3 and the mailing list was seeing the same questions every other day. Luckily once it was posted the hits soared and mails diminished :)

Due to my poor wiki formatting skills I was shut down pretty hard by the maintainer and decided contributing and updating the wiki just wasn't worth the grief. Unfortunately that kind of elitist attitude is pretty common and I'm sure contributes to how stale some documentation becomes, seeing as the less experienced are the ones that try and contribute through documentation. Ironic really ... the ones who complain are most likely the ones causing the problem.

Sarton


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