> From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
> Date: Wed, 04 Oct 1995 01:34:15 -0700

[ Ken asks if the new installation stuff will work in other ports? ]

> It could be easily adapted to other ports, yes.  [...]

> I personally like the miniroot approach, and don't see any reason why it
> couldn't be used on the i386, even.  The hp300's 5mb miniroot might take 
> a while to dump to disk over the network (there's a standalone program, 
> SYS_INST, that labels the boot disk, copies miniroot from NFS server, 
> boots miniroot), but it has lots of regular tools that make getting the 
> installation task done a lot easier (like vi(1), for example).
> 
> You might find it interesting to just take a look at that stuff ... 
> adaptability was in mind when I wrote it, and I know of at least one 
> person who is considering using it for another port...I'll let him speak 
> up if he wants...

I am working on a miniroot setup for the Sun3 port.  The first step
is something to partition the disk and install the miniroot in swap.
Instead of using a standalone program for that, I've come up with a
really small ramdisk kernel that can do the job.  The ramdisk setup
can copy the miniroot image from one of several sources:
  boot tape: (mt rewind; mt fsf 1; dd ...)
  NFS mount: (ifconfig ...; mount ...; dd...) *
  remote sh: (ifconfig ...; rsh server 'gzcat mroot.gz' | dd ...) *

I too like the miniroot approach.  Once you have it loaded you can
boot up single-user with a fairly complete set of tools available.

> I must say, out of all of the above installation options, FTP is by far 
> my favorite ... For people who have access to a network, all you need is 
> to d/l the miniroot media, and connect to ftp.NetBSD.ORG or a mirror for 
> the actual distribution :-)  (Ok, well I haven't tested _that_ part yet, 
> but it's sure nifty on my little network at home! :-)

Yeah, that's cool.  I wondered if there might be a way to use FTP
but not have to store the tar images locally.  Would this work?

	# mkfifo /dev/pipe
	# tar xfp /dev/pipe &
	# ftp ...
	ftp> get some_tar_image /dev/pipe

I haven't tried it with FTP yet...

Gordon