[SunRescue] Continuing foibles of Tim and SGI

[TimHarrisonharrison at timharrison.com]

Hey folks.  

Yes, yet again, I have another SGI problem. :)

So, I bought an IRIS Indigo.  Nice little machine (heavy as all
get-out).  Cracked the root passwd, and off I went.  Now, I still have
that damned Indy to deal with.  So, with the assistance of an IRIX CD
image (shhhhhh, it's for eval purposes), I'm thinking I'm ready.  Well,
not quite.  No external Sun/SGI bootable CD-ROM drive.  

This leads me to a nifty thought.  What if I could transfer the image to
the Indigo, mount the ISO image, and install from the network.  

If I were running Linux, on this box, and it supported EFS, I'd be
laughing.  Unfortunately, that's not the case.  

Is there an equivalent, in IRIX, to this Linux mount command:

mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop=/dev/loop0 irix_install.iso /cdrom

I can't find any type of loopback device (other than the network
loopback).  


Also, I cracked the root passwd of the Indy, but when I log in, it kicks
me back out immediately.  I can go into single user mode, and play
around, but if I try to log in through xdm, I get booted back to the
login screen.  The root account does it, the guest account does it. 
This is quite a mess.

And to make it all worse, my wife bought this Indy for me, and is all
upset that it hasn't worked at all.  No pressure.  No, not at all.

Any thoughts (other than buying a Sun bootable CD-ROM drive... I was
hoping to surprise my wife with it up and running today)?

-- 


Tim Harrison
Network Engineer
harrison at timharrison.com
http://www.networklevel.com/