On Tue, Oct 13, 1998 at 04:35:06PM +1000, Simon Burge wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Oct 1998 23:11:59 -0700  Nick Moffitt wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Oct 12, 1998 at 04:08:00PM -0700, Jonathan Stone wrote:
> > 	It's a Toshiba XM drive, and about as standard as you can get.
> > 
> > > Did you  specify 
> > > 
> > >     mount -o ro -t cd9660 /dev/rz?a  /mount/point
> > 
> > 	I tried:
> > mount -r -t cd9660 /dev/rz4c /mnt2
> 
> I would expect this one to work...  Umm, /mnt2 does exist??

	Yes it does.  I even made /cdrom and tried to mount it
there--no dice.

> > 	The drive does respond to some prodding (like trying to mount
> > it ffs, which fails miserably, but the thing does spin up).  The
> > only problem is that when I specify a mount point, it says
> > "invalid argument".
> 
> The kernel in the 1.3.2 release does include the cd9660 driver.  Can
> you do something as simple as:
> 
> 	dd if=/dev/rz4c of=/some/file/name bs=512 count=2048
> 
> This should read the first megabyte off the CD.

	I'll give this a try when next I get the CD-ROM drive on loan
(it isn't mine, and I'll have to ask for it again in order to do any
more troubleshooting).

> I'm in the process of trying to improve the documentation available
> for the pmax port, starting with the web pages at
> http://www.NetBSD.ORG/Ports/pmax/index.html.  Please let me (or the
> list in general) know where you thing the doco is deficient, and
> I'll try and do something about it.

	Well, here in San Francisco, I'm seeing a lot of these
DECStation 5000/25s being chucked from IS departments and university
labs left and right.  More often than not they've been landing in the
laps of some well meaning Linux types who want to put an open-source
OS on the thing.  I think that a general covering of the following
topics would have made my installation experience much better:
 
	How drive partitioning works in Ultrix (chpt)
	How drive partitioning works in NetBSD/pmax (disklabel)
	How the boot console works (I had a devil of a time getting
the ecoff kernel to boot, until I realized that it needed to go on the
same partition as the Ultrixboot stuff.  Unfortunately, the root
partition was only 16MB, and I had to do some creative symlinking and
moving files between volumes to get everything to boot.)
	
	Partitioning was what held me up for the largest part.  I had
to deduce the fact that some partitions were there to be ignored, and
I have a heavily marked-up copy of the chpt man page lying next to the
machine.  The overlap stuff was confusing to me, as the intel world
tends not to display partitions that haven't been made active.

> > On an unrelated note, I find that the base installation is missing
> > some utilites, such as fdisk, which I rather need in order to try
> > to bring another of my drives up.  adduser is also missing, and
> > I've had to guess a bit about the behavior of the master.passwd
> > and passwd files (I must confess that I am not as familiar as I
> > should be with the Berkeley Way).  Am I to assume that these are
> > on the packages CD (which I am unable to mount)?
> 
> "fdisk" doesn't exist in the pmax world - you use "disklabel"
> (included in the base distribution) to set up partitions.  As far as
> an "adduser" command - there's a man page that describes how to set
> up an account (ie, the master.passwd stuff).  I use the "vipw"
> command to set up accounts myself.

	OK.  Well, there is a man page for fdisk, and another for
adduser.  I'll look around--thanks!

-- 
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