NeXTstation booting, NetInfo, and NTP

[Jerry Weiss]

On Jan 25, 2016, at 7:28 AM, Pete Turnbull <pete at dunnington.plus.com> wrote:
> 
> Yesterday I dug out my NexTstation (68040 25MHz slab with 32MB of 100ns SIMMs) which has OpenStep 4.2 for Mach installed.  The lithium battery was flat and it wouldn't boot so I've ordered a replacement and temporarily kludged a pair of alkaline AAs to get it going. So far, so good, though it thinks today is September 6 2001 :-)
> 
> Then I used SimpleNetworkStarter, set to "Use the network, but don't share administrative data".  I've also edited /etc/hostconfig and reslv.conf to sensible values (eg TIME=-NO-) so it now boots quite quickly.
> 
> Is there a way to disable NetInfo completely, and if so will things like DNS lookups still work?
> 
> Is there an easy way to make it get its time/date settings from my NTP server?  During startup it does claim to start netinfo, lookupd, ntpd (see below), then inetd,
> 
> I have an SGI running IRIX which is my DHCP, DNS, and NTP server, and  I plan to set up the NexT to use DHCP to get its IP address etc (it's static ATM).
> 

You cannot disable Netinfo on that version of Openstep.   Its integrated too tightly with the system.   See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetInfo <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetInfo>

For NTP turn on TIME=-Automatic-  and in Netinfo add an ip address for the reference to /locations/ntp/server.   You might need to force the first sync via ntp -v -F