> >Well:
> >	(1) you need an /etc/master.passwd file, in addition to that
> >		passwd file,
> >	(2) you need to have the password db's made, too.  (This can
> >		be accomplished with 'pwd_mkdb'
> 
> And /etc/services, /etc/protocols, etc.  The miniroot has enough to boot --
> it doesn't seem to be intended to help bring the machine up any further than
> that.

The miniroot I got from gregorio.stanford.edu had /etc/services but not
/etc/protocols or /etc/hosts (I made my own of that last but it seems to
ignore it, so I used the numeric octets).  I feel I'm well on my way to
a useable system, using Jonathon's binaries, Dean's cross-disklabel, and
advice from this list.

Using Dean's disklabel under Ultrix, I created 4 partitions on the disk:
root, starting at block 16 for about 16 Mbytes, then swap (about 16
Mbytes), a 5 Mbyte partition which served as a trampoline, and the rest
for usr.  Skipping all the stuff I had to try over and over before I got
it sorted out:

First, I had put Dean's bootblock and Jonathon's miniroot on the
first partition and booted it, newfs'ed and mounted the usr partition,
and, with the advice of Dean and Chris on 'pwd_mkdb', I ifconfig'ed le0
and rcp'ed Jonathon's /usr binaries onto it, with:

    rcp -rp 192.9.200.8:/partD/netbsd/usr /

but that left me with a root filesystem 98% full on a root partition
two-thirds empty, so I dd'ed the miniroot onto the 5 Mbyte 'd' partition
where it fit snugly.  I wanted to change the disklabel, but I couldn't
run disklabel -e under netbsd because I didn't have /v/tmp/vi.recover,
or TERM, or any of that, so I booted up Ultrix and ran Dean's
cross-disklabel once more.  All I did was change the partition letters
at the beginning of the lines, so now the partition starting at block 16
was 'd' and the 5 Mbyte partition I'd just put the miniroot on was 'a'.
halt Ultrix and boot NetBSD again.

The miniroot came right up again, I newfs'ed the 16 Mbyte partition,
mounted it on /mnt, copied netbsd and /etc/* from the current root
onto it, ifconfig'ed and rcp'ed Jonathon's /bin and /sbin onto it, and
tar'ed the /dev directory from the current root:

    tar cf - /dev | (cd /mnt ; tar xvf -)


Then I halted NetBSD and booted Ultrix so I could run Dean's disklabel
one last time to change the 'a' and 'd' partition letters back, then
halted Ultrix and booted my new NetBSD root.

As long as I'm willing to type numbers rather than names I can mount_nfs
filesystems from my server, and telnet to it, and most everything I've
tried works fine, within the limitations of what I know is missing.

Let me restate that.  I don't claim to _know_ what's missing, but I do
know that I should have a lot more stuff in /etc, I don't have a /var at
all, I don't even have /usr/include.

All this finally comes around to my question:  What next?  What's the
best way to proceed to flesh this thing out?

Thanks again, everybody.  When I finally got around to trying this stuff
everything came together MUCH easier than I imagined!



-- 
Ted Spradley                tsprad@metronet.com             +1-214-484-5356
Brisco: "...the more I learn the less I know."
Bowler: "At the rate we're learning things we won't know nothing in no time."