Installing NetBSD is a relatively complex process, but if you have this document in hand it should not be too difficult. There are several ways to install NetBSD onto your disk. If your machine has a tape drive the easiest way is "Installing from tape" (details below). If your machine is on a network with a suitable NFS server, then "Installing from NFS" is the next best method. Otherwise, if you have another Sun machine running SunOS you can initialize the disk on that machine and then move the disk. (Installing from SunOS is not recommended.) * Installing from tape: Create the NetBSD/sun3 1.2 boot tape as described in the section entitled "Preparing a boot tape" and boot the tape. At the PROM monitor prompt, use one of the commands: >b st() >b st(0,8,0) The first example will use the tape on SCSI target 4, where the second will use SCSI target 5. The '>' is the monitor prompt. After the tape loads, you should see many lines of configuration messages, and then the following "welcome" screen: Welcome to the NetBSD/sun3 RAMDISK root! This environment is designed to do only three things: 1: Partititon your disk (use the command: edlabel /dev/rsd0c) 2: Copy a miniroot image into the swap partition (/dev/rsd0b) 3: Reboot (using the swap partition, i.e. /dev/sd?b). Copying the miniroot can be done several ways, allowing the source of the miniroot image to be on any of these: boot tape, NFS server, TFTP server, rsh server The easiest is loading from tape, which is done as follows: mt -f /dev/nrst0 rewind mt -f /dev/nrst0 fsf 2 dd bs=32k if=/dev/nrst0 of=/dev/rsd0b (For help with other methods, please see the install notes.) To reboot using the swap partition, first use "halt", then at the PROM monitor prompt use a command like: b sd(,,1) -s To view this message again, type: cat /.welcome [ End of "welcome" screen. ] Copy the miniroot as described in the welcome message, and reboot from that just installed miniroot. See the section entitled "Booting the miniroot" for details. * Installing from NFS: Before you can install from NFS, you must have already configured your NFS server to support your machine as a diskless client. Instructions for configuring the server are found in the section entitled "Getting the NetBSD System onto Useful Media" above. First, at the Sun PROM monitor prompt, enter a boot command using the network interface as the boot device. On desktop machines this is "le", and "ie" on the others. Examples: >b le() -s >b ie() -s After the boot program loads the RAMDISK kernel, you should see the welcome screen as shown in the "tape boot" section above. You must configure the network interface before you can use any network resources. For example the command: ssh> ifconfig le0 inet 192.233.20.198 up will bring up the network interface with that address. The next step is to copy the miniroot from your server. This can be done using either NFS or remote shell. (In the examples that follow, the server has IP address 192.233.20.195) You may then need to add a default route if the server is on a different subnet: ssh> route add default 192.233.20.255 1 You can look at the route table using: ssh> route show Now mount the NFS filesystem containing the miniroot image: ssh> mount -r 192.233.20.195:/server/path /mnt The procedure is simpler if you have space for an expanded (not compressed) copy of the miniroot image. In that case: ssh> dd if=/mnt/miniroot of=/dev/rsd0b bs=8k Otherwise, you will need to use "zcat" to expand the miniroot image while copying. This is tricky because the "ssh" program (small shell) does not handle sh(1) pipeline syntax. Instead, you first run the reader in the background with its input set to /dev/pipe and then run the other program in the foreground with its output to /dev/pipe. The result looks like this: ssh> run -bg dd if=/dev/pipe of=/dev/rsd0b obs=8k ssh> run -o /dev/pipe zcat /mnt/install/miniroot.gz To load the miniroot using rsh to the server, you would use a pair of commands similar to the above. Here is another example: ssh> run -b dd if=/dev/pipe of=/dev/rsd0b obs=8k ssh> run -o /dev/pipe rsh 192.233.20.195 zcat miniroot.gz * Booting the miniroot: If the miniroot was installed on partition 'b' of the disk with SCSI target ID=0 then the PROM boot command would be: >b sd(0,0,1) -s With SCSI target ID=2, the the PROM is: >b sd(0,10,1) -s The numbers in parentheses above are: controller (usually zero) unit number (SCSI ID * 8, in hexadecimal) partition number Miniroot install program: ------------------------ The miniroot's install program is very simple to use. It will guide you through the entire process, and is well automated. Additional improvements are planned for future releases. The miniroot's install program will: * Allow you to place disklabels on additional disks. The disk we are installing on should already have been partitioned using the RAMDISK kernel. Note that partition sizes and offsets are expressed in sectors. When you fill out the disklabel, you will need to specify partition types and filesystem parameters. If you're unsure what the these values should be, use the following: fstype: 4.2BSD fsize: 1024 bsize: 4096 cpg: 16 If the partition will be a swap partition, use the following: fstype: swap fsize: 0 (or blank) bsize: 0 (or blank) cpg: 0 (or blank) The number of partitions is fixed at 8 (by the Sun PROM). * Create filesystems on target partitions. * Allow you to set up your system's network configuration. Remember to specify host names without the domain name appended to the end. For example use `foo' instead of `foo.bar.org'. If, during the process of configuring the network interfaces, you make a mistake, you will be able to re-configure that interface by simply selecting it for configuration again. * Mount target filesystems. You will be given the opportunity to manually edit the resulting /etc/fstab. * Extract binary sets from the media of your choice. * Copy configuration information gathered during the installation process to your root filesystem. * Make device nodes in your root filesystem. * Copy a new kernel onto your root partition. * Install a new boot block. * Check your filesystems for integrity. First-time installation on a system through a method other than the installation program is possible, but strongly discouraged.