Conrad,

You're correct in you first assumption, but not your second.  Yes, in
general, it's better to IPL from DASD than from the reader.  Not only does
it free up spool space, but its a lot faster.  No, they won't have to
respond to any prompts.  Once the system is set up properly and running, it
just IPLs and runs.

How this is accomplished, depends on what distribution/kernel you're
running.  The 2.2 kernels use a program called "silo" (or "zilo") to write
the boot information out to disk.  The 2.4 kernels use a program named
"zipl" to do the same thing.  In either case, you can specify all the
parameters that are needed on the command itself, or use a configuration
file in /etc (/etc/silo.conf or /etc/zipl.conf) to provide the necessary
information.  Tell us what you're running, and we can give you more details.
(For the 2.2 kernel series, you can look at the "Linux for S/390:
Distributions" Redbook at
http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg246264.html)

Mark Post

-----Original Message-----
From: Conrad Sanders [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, February 07, 2003 9:07 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: IPLING Linux from RDR


I am fairly new to Linux but not to VM.  We are supporting a few Linux
guests on our VM system and our Linux group have been ipling the Linux
kernel from the VM RDR.  Since this takes a fair amout of spool space,
wouldn't a better alternative be to IPL directly from disk ?.  Is there some
kind of documentation available to show us how to transfer the VM RDR image
to a disk volume so they could IPL from disk ?.  I am also assuming if they
are ipling from the RDR they have to repsond to the Suse or Red Hat prompts
each time they IPL.

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