On Sun, 7 Aug 2005 15:18:40 -0400, Jim Fron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >On Aug 7, 2005, at 2:46 PM, J.C. Roberts wrote: > >> Floppy drives and diskettes are notorious for failing in very strange >> and unusual ways. Check out the mild but insightful message from Art >> on tech@ if you want to know the general consensus on floppies. > >That's good to know. Unfortunately, most of my machines (mac) don't >have serial ports. At times I wonder if Apple not supporting serial is smart or dumb but I never seem to come to a conclusion... A USB to serial device may do the trick but personally, I've never tried it. >My other sparc box is the reason I'm trying to >configure this one: it stopped responding to the serial port and >keyboard, it displays only a blank white screen on the monitor, and >the ethernet port that didn't have all inbound services pf-blocked >died on me, so I can't ssh into it. It's my NAT/firewall, and, >though I have no way of getting into or out of the box, it's still >running, and I don't want to risk powering it down until I have a >replacement configured. :-/ > >So, going with the idea that "floppies are just unreliable," I seem >to have three options: > >1. Use the floppy to boot, exit the installer, and install and >configure manually (it doesn't seem to crash when I ftp tarballs in, >but crashes regularly when I use the installer to do it). Has anyone >written a walk-through for doing this? > >2. Figure out how to configure OSX (client) as a netboot server. > >3. Buy an OBSD CD, unplug the SCSI CDR drive from the running >firewall and hope it doesn't crash. > >I'm eyeing option #1 right now. > Hopefully you've tried redownloading and reimaging on a new floppy diskette. The diskette could be the problem but if the created floppy is passing the test in the OBSD Install FAQ, the only possibility left for floppy being the cause is a bad diskette drive in the SS20 (or the drive just has dirty heads). I don't have the bandwidth to mess around with multiple/repeated FTP installs from the internet. It takes too long, so I usually transfer the files once and then host the FTP locally. It makes installs a lot easier. Option #2 with a local FTP server might work but getting a serial console on the beast should be your goal. If you've got flaky hardware in the SS20, you don't want to use it as a replacement for your (currently failing) firewall. Serial is probably the best way to figure out what the heck is going wrong. Using your MacOS box with tip and a USB->serial converter might just work. JCR -- A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
