Well... you are going to run up against the goals of tomsrtbt, but, I can help with some of these issues... > I can get netcat working okay, but... no authentication. Tomsrtbt is intended for rescue and recovery. I do plan to add xtea for encryption. Of course, it included rsh and rshd, which do use some authentication. Typically, though, authentication is not critical when you are trying to recover a crashed machine. The usual sequence is, run nc on the server you are recovering from manually, run it from tomsrtbt manually, with little security risk. Did you try using rsh/rshd? > I've confirmed 0.99 doesn't handle full duplex. > I've confirmed ver 1.23 DOES handle it. Performance issues are explicitely NOT important for recovery. I would say, use half duplex. When recovering a dead server, whether it reloads a little faster is not usually important... Certainly, if tomsrtbt has a network driver that supports the card, I am more than happy. > I have source and object module for version1.23, > but it's for kernel 2.2.12. I mount a separate floppy, You should just build a 2.2.15 kernel with what you need compiled in and replace the whole kernel. Just configure it with ramdisk support and minix filesystem support, and replace the tomsrtbt zImage with your own zImage, and run the build.s, tomsrtbt works fine with 2.2.x kernels. Blow away all the 2.0.x modules and compile everything in, or replace them with the 2.2.x modules, as you wish. I'll answer your unpack.s issues below. > 2. Although I copied rc.custom.gz to /tmp, then gzip -d, > added lines to mount the floppy and insmod the > pcnet32.o (version 0.99), then gzip, then copy to > floppy and reboot, my commands are ignored. > I am trying to execute just before ifconfig eth0: > > mkdir /floppy > mount /dev/fd0u1722 /floppy > insmod /floppy/pcnet32.o The /dev/fd0u1722 is already mounted at that point on /fl, so, the mount command would be ignored in any case. You only would need to add the "insmod /fl/pcnet32.o". But, again, it will be much more straightforward to just replace the whole kernel after running ./unpack.s. > I can't figure out why the steps are ignored. > There's no msg on screen or in dmesg. There is probably a message that says "/dev/fd0u1722 is already mounted". > I can't successfully run the unpack.s and > and buildit.s. I tried them, just to see if I could. ... > I created /mnt/hda1, and mounted my /dev/hda1. (DOS) > I created a directory called /mnt/hda1/temp/tomsrtbt. > I cd'd to there, and ran /usr/doc/unpack.s. As noted in the FAQ, it must run in a LINUX filesystem, either ext2 or minix. It CANNOT run on a DOS filesystem, as links are not supported, and such. DO THIS if you don't have a Linux filesystem available: mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=20000 of=/mnt/hda1/loopfile mke2fs /mnt/hda1/loopfile mkdir /mnt/loop mount -o loop /mnt/hda1/loopfile /mnt/loop cd /mnt/loop unpack.s /dev/fd0u1722 etc... I suppose I need to make unpack.s fail more clearly if it is attempted on a DOS filesystem... -Tom
