Lying by omission (was Re: Does troff work?) + boot problem soln.

[Stefan Brandle]

Sympathy re your flames.
 
> 	And guess what?  Our network of DECstations is not up and running
> yet, over a month since it was delivered.  Why?  Because of one of the
> "little surprises", our DS3100's won't boot.  Not only that, but if they
> WOULD boot, we could not use them in the configuration we wanted because
> (surprise!) DEC's diskless boot environment (DMS) requires an ENORMOUS
> amount of server disk space... far more than we can afford to waste on our
> server.

I recently (2 weeks ago) got a DS3100 and it wouldn't boot.  In that case, the
problem was that the ris(8) software didn't quite set everything up correctly
on the server.  When the machine tries to boot, there are three files that get
sent -- the primary, secondary, and tertiary (sp?) -- that progressively get
the machine up and running.  The problem was that the symbolic link to that
file that's supposed to be in the /usr/lib/dnet directory wasn't there.  I
caught on to the problem when I took a peek in /usr/spool/mqueue/syslog and
found the server complaining about not being able to find that file.  The file
name that the server was looking for was `vmunixudt030.sys' and it's supposed
to be pointing to `/usr/sys/MIPS/SAS/vmunix' or else to the appropriate generic
vmunix that comes in the base software set on the tapes.  I further ran into
the problem that when I pointed the `vmunixudt030.sys' to the 
/usr/sys/MIPS/SAS/vmunix for the DECsystem 5400, we kinda booted but had 
problems with device drivers not seeing the SCSI RZ-stuff (I had expected that 
to be a problem but hoped it might work).  So I extracted the correct vmunix 
from the ris subsets (base system, I believe) and set the link to that, and 
everybody lived happily ever after (or for at least another hour or so until I 
tried installing some 3rd party software).

Your problem may or may not be related; I'm posting this in the hope that it
may benefit you or somebody else.  When I finally talked to a person from DEC
(we kept missing each other until after I solved the problem) it was suggested
that the problem was that I had a tape for stand-alone installation (tape unit
attached to the machine) and needed a different tape for remote installation.
Sounds possible -- maybe our sales rep got us the wrong part number or
something.
 
In case anybody wonders, our server is a DECsystem 5400 running 3.1C and the 
workstation is a DECsystem 3100 running 3.1D.

Good luck to us all,
Stefan
-- 
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Stefan Brandle                  UUCP: ...!{obdient,uunet!tellab5}!wheaton!stefan
Wheaton College			or	stefan at wheaton.UUCP
Wheaton, IL 60187 		"But I never claimed to be sane!"