On Dec 18, 2012, at 1:10 PM, Josh Dersch wrote:
On 12/18/2012 12:25 PM, Guy Sotomayor wrote:
On Dec 18, 2012, at 11:27 AM, Josh Dersch wrote:
Is it actually possible to netboot from something
other than another 'bolix machine? I know there are a couple of experimental Chaosnet
implementations out there but I've never played with one of these. (Also, I was under
the impression that netbooting still required a local disk to store the FEP files &
netboot world).
I'm not sure. Right now, I'm trying to familiarize myself
with it. That could be true.
My biggest thing right now is to get the "site" configuration done and get this
on my home network.
Anyone have a simple "cookbook" set of instructions to get started with? Right
now I'm trying to figure
out how to dig out the ethernet MAC address so I can add it to my DHCP configuration.
I can point you in the right direction. This is all from memory (it's been awhile
since I've done this) so this may not be 100% accurate but it should get you started.
I'm not sure how to get the MAC address (I've always just looked at my
router's recently-used MAC list and worked it out from there) but I'm sure someone
else here can help out?
I was figuring that I could do that. Just wanted to see if there was a way to get at it
directly from the Symbolics.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Document Examiner (Select-D) is your best friend.
All the documentation is available there and it's pretty easy to search (use the
"Select Candidates" command).
Yep. Been using that?just reading at this point (and I have all of the Genera 8 docs from
Bitsavers).
As far as I know I have all of the software packages that Symbolics produced loaded up on
the machine (how do I tell what's there BTW?).
1) Make sure you have the IP/TCP System loaded into your Genera World if it hasn't
already been. The documentation is available in the Document Examiner, you might also
read through
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/symbolics/software/genera_8/Symbolic….
I'm making the assumption that the actual software is already present on the disk (if
not it may be a bit more difficult). Loading the IP/TCP system can be accomplished from a
Lisp Listener with the command "Load System Ip-tcp" and after this you can
invoke (tcp:initialize-internet-namespace) to set up the basic INTERNET namespace in your
Site's namespace.
At this point you will want to save the world (who doesn't?) using the "Save
World" command. Alternately, you might want to load the NFS client and server
Systems before doing this, just to get those taken care of as well. "Save
World" takes the running Lisp image (including the systems you've just loaded)
and writes it out to a World file on your FEP partition. This can be done Incrementally
(in which case the new World file is sort of a diff of the current World) or you can save
the entire world in a new file; the latter takes a lot more disk space.
"Save World" will prompt you whether to update the FEP boot files automatically
-- do so. At this point log out, halt the machine, and reboot.
2) Add Namespace objects for IP/TCP hosts on your network. This is also covered in the
aforementioned documentation, but in a nutshell, use the command "Create Namespace
Object <Host /hostname>/." This will invoke the Namespace Editor which you can
use to define attributes of the other machines on your network (address, protocols they
support, OS type, etc.) You'll probably want to define the machine-type as
"UNIX42" for anything that's not another symbolics machine (unless you
happen to have some TOPS-20 machines on your network :)). You can describe what services
the machine supports (FTP, NFS, Telnet, etc). NFS configuration is a whole different can
of worms and can (in my experience) be a bit annoying, mostly around authentication. I
usually give up and allow anonymous access from my Symbolics machines :).
When you're done with a new Host entry, be sure to save it by clicking on the
"Save Object" command.
The really cool thing about Genera's namespace system is that once you have your
hosts properly defined, file transfers (and other connectivity) are done transparently
from the user's perspective. That is, if you had a host that exposed only FTP, and
another host that exposed only NFS, the command to copy a file from both of those hosts is
identical (Copy File UNIXHOST:/foo/bar/baz/thing.tar ...) and Genera works out the
transport to use underneath the covers.
That should be enough to get your machine on the network and talking to other machines.
OK. I'll start with that. Absolutely no site configuration has been done on this
system (it keeps telling me that when I boot up). So I suspect that's something
I need to do sooner rather than later. ;-)
Thanks.
TTFN - Guy