On 21 Mar, Georg Schwarz wrote:

> Looks like I have a VS3100 {30|40} (so which one?) 
Do a
show ver 
at the bootprompt and compare the output to the CPU-types in 
http://www.de.netbsd.org/Library/Hardware/Machines/DEC/vax/vaxstations.html#section:vaxstations

> Now, should I try to install NetBSD 1.4.2, or should I rather try to install
> the current snapshot on this model?
Install a snapshoot. If you can wait for two days my VS3100m76 will
have finished the build of 1.4V.

> Also, can I make the setup program use both disks, say sd0 for /, /swap and
> sd1 for /usr?
Usualy nobody uses the install program. ;-)
Boot the box, via net, via floppy, ... to get a single user shell. 
Put a disklabel on the disks ("disklabel -i sd0" is very comfortable.
"P" prints, "W" writes, "Q" quits),
install the bootblocks ("disklabel -B sd0"), 
make the filesystems ("newfs /dev/rsd0a"...), 
mount them on /mnt, ("mount -o async /dev/sd0a /mnt"...)
untar the wanted dist-sets, 
make the devicenodes ("cd /mnt/dev ; ./MAKEDEV all") 
and do basic configuration ("vi /mnt/etc/fstab /mnt/rc.conf"). 
Now the box should boot from the local SCSI Disk. 

BTW: You can enable easy commandline history / editing with the BSD
bourne shell with the command "set -E". And you can automate the
untaring of the dist-sets with a for loop:
for a in /where/the/dist-sets/are/*.tgz ; do tar xzpf $a -C /mnt ; done

> BTW, those HDs are *really, really* noisy!! Is there anything that could be
> done about that?
Replace them. ;-)
-- 



tschüß,
         Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/