I untarred the sysinst.tar.gz on a fileserver and netbooted a 2100
from that, then dd'd the diskimage to a local disk.  I then booted
from that disk and sysinsted.  Here's some feedback on my results.

- It isn't possible to sysinst to the disk you just installed from, so
this method requires two disks.  I realize it's not reasonable to
expect this to work, but it isn't documented in the pmax install
NOTES.

- Before starting sysinst you need to remount root read-write.  This
should either be documented or sysinst should do it for you.  If root
is left readonly, sysinst will fail to mount the partitions for the
new disk after newfsing them.

- sysinst does not clean up if you kill it e.g. by hitting ^C.
Specifically it should reset the terminal mode to something
reasonable, and unmount any filesystems it mounted.

- sysinst really needs some way to pop back to previous menus without
killing and restarting it.

- if unpacking any of the archives fails (e.g. if the archive is
missing) sysinst should print a warning and verify before continuing.
Currently it just blindly continues.  I encountered this problem when
I accidentally left off the last path element of the nfs filesystem
where the sysinst tarball archives are stored.  (the disk is exported
-alldirs, so the mount succeeded but the tar extracts failed.)

- it would be nice if sysinst gave the option of installing all or
part of the system to an NFS fileserver, for diskless or partially
diskless configurations.

- sysinst has menus for some things and plaintext questions for other
things.  This inconsistency is ugly.  It should consistently do things
one way or the other.  If being pretty is unimportant, we shouldn't
have a tool like this in the first place :-/

- (pmax-specific): sysinst expected to find a 'kern.tar.gz' but there
was only a (empty) kernels.tar.gz out there in the
1.3_ALPHA/pmax/binary directory.  Not a big deal but probably worth
pointing out...

- (pmax-specific): sysinst complains if the target disk is smaller
than 150M.  This means that an install to an rz23 is probably
completely out of the question.  This might be worth mentioning in the
install NOTES.

- I asked sysinst to save my network settings.  It wrote my hostname
to /etc/hosts but didn't write it to /etc/myname or to /etc/rc.conf.
My system thought it was "myname.my.domain" on its first reboot.

I encountered a few other problems, but I think all of the others were
reported here earlier today.  I apologize if any of the above are
already known and reported, I didn't save earlier problem reports, and
probably should have because I knew I was intending to do this install.

Cheers,
entropy

--
entropy -- it's not just a good idea, it's the second law.