Puzzle for Doug...

[Robert G. Brown]

On Tue, 28 Jul 1998, Greg Wickham wrote:

> Hmmm ... for what it's worth, I am running a 2940U2W controller
> with Ultra2 LVD and narrow SE devices. After the 'tweak' last week
> all basically works fine, except that I *HAVE* to enable a
> serial console otherwise when the kernel boots it just generates
> heaps of scsi timeout errors. Must be some form of timing problem,
> because the more diagnostics which are produced during booting then
> the less errors/timeouts I get.
> 
> Of course, I've been hammering all devices on the chains and
> everything appears great!

I was preparing to do a mass install (I have 16 boxes to get running)
but right now it looks like it is going to be a crap shoot as to
whether or not a given box will come up.  And, as I just noted, it
looks like the NMI error can occur even on systems that do survive the
boot even when they are totally idle and have been up stably overnight.

I'll see how many of these systems I can get going and try to collect
a full picture of the death-throe messages and post them.  Perhaps the
location of the problem will be a clue to the wise.

> As an aside, does anyone know how to make a redhat install disk
> with 2.0.35(+aic7xxx+pre5+tweak)?

We're not running redhat (yet) but I'm pretty good at making a variety
of bootdisk combo's.  I can give you help at:

  a) Making a script-driven diskless boot kit.  You cut the kernel of
your choice, put it in the appropriate directory, supply a
shared/exported root image (with a special tweak in /etc/fstab and
/etc/rc.d/rc.S), supply private exported var, etc, tmp and dev and you
can bring up a diskless system in five minutes or less.  When it is up
as a full peer, of course you can run any kind of install you like.

  b) Making a slackware-style boot/root combo.  I have again a script
driven kit with a template ELF-only floppy-based root.  Put the kernel
of your choice on the bootdisk and it loads the rootdisk.  I used to
do installs from this but diskless boots are even better -- one has to
do a lot of stuff by hand.  The advantage of having your own private
template root fs is that you can easily customize it to include YOUR
favorite binaries (within the capacity limits of a compressed root
floppy, around 4 MB total uncompressed space).  I personally include
jove for example -- I hate coming up without a decent editor (and/or
pager).  I imagine that you could put redhat's install tools in the
root image instead of slackware's and it would work OK.

I can wrap up either or both in a tarball and put up a URL, if you
want it.  The second one will require a bit of tweaking, as I note, to
get it running, but presuming RH's install tools are available on a
standard installed root image, the first one should require just
splicing in a RH root and etc in place of my more generic one.

   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu




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