Re: Mopd which works with ELF and a.out in Linux and can netboot ULTRIX

["Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro%linux-mips.org@localhost>]

On Sat, 31 Oct 2020, Anders Magnusson wrote:

> >>   Regrettably I was unable to find any package maintainer or proper
> >> upstream sources, so my patches were never submitted anywhere, but I
> >> packaged them into the RPM format (one of the two major Linux package
> >> formats) in the source and a couple of binary forms and published on my
> >> FTP site, in addition to loose patches.  This stuff is still online, so if
> >> anyone is interested, please feel free to have a look at:
> >>
> >> <ftp://ftp.linux-mips.org/pub/linux/mips/people/macro/mopd/>
> >>
> >>   I'll be happy to have this stuff upstreamed too even now after those 20
> >> years if there's still something missing from whatever `mopd' sources are
> >> considered the reference these days.
> > I think the canonical mopd was (and may still be) in NetBSD
> > http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/usr.sbin/mopd/ but active
> > development directly intended to support Linux while not breaking
> > existing platforms is happening in dreamlayers' repo
> > https://github.com/dreamlayers/netbsd-mopd (which I hope to sync back
> > into NetBSD's version on an ongoing basis)

 I'm very wary of keeping anything at GitHub, as the site is proprietary 
and requires one to accept T&C's for write access while not guaranteeing 
the owners won't pull the plug sometime.  They're Microsoft-owned too, 
which doesn't build my confidence either.

 Also having proper releases aka tarballs from time to time would make 
sense to me too.  I think that would give `mopd' a chance to reappear in 
binary Linux distributions, at least the more techie ones, making it 
easier to people to configure their environments.

> > It would be very cool to merge back all of your patches which still apply :)

 I can surely try and polish some stuff (once I'm done with the current 
GCC effort of course), and the timing is good as I need to figure out why 
the DEFPA does not work with my new server and then build and install 
`mopd' there to serve FDDI and Ethernet clients.  While at it I could try 
and debug the outstanding issues too.

> IIRC it was Mats O Jansson (moj@stacken) that wrote it from the beginning. 
> And see - he still has an informative web page available for it :-)
> 
> http://www.stacken.kth.se/~moj/mopd.html

 Yep, this is what my RPM package spec refers to:

Summary: The Maintenance Operations Protocol (MOP) loader daemon
Name: mopd
Version: 2.5.3
Release: 15
Copyright: BSD
Group: System Environment/Daemons
#Source0: ftp://ise.canberra.edu.au/linux-vax/tools/mopd/mopd-linux-%{version}.tar.gz
Source0: ftp://ftp.stacken.kth.se/pub/OS/NetBSD/%{name}/%{name}-%{version}.tar.gz

(the original Linux host support patch was created as a diff between the 
former and the latter tarball).  Also 2.5.3 was the last proper release, 
made many years before my input to it.  Sadly the original FTP site does 
not appear operative anymore.

  Maciej