[rescue] Okay.. OS thoughts

[Neil McNeight]

On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, Bill Bradford wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 12:12:56AM -0500, James Sharp wrote:
> > Debian wasn't bad on my U30, except for it being a castiron pain in the
> > ass cause it didn't like my Raptor card.
>
> This will be a headless box.  I've got enough monitors already; this one will
> sit in the closet and be SSHed to.

For a headless Debian install, make sure you have a keyboard plugged in.
When I tried to install off of floppies, the serial console would not
respond to the "switch disks and hit ENTER" request, no matter what NVRAM
settings (it's been a while, but something along the lines of "set
console ttya" or "set keyboard ttya") or other tricks I tried.

I don't know how a CD install will go over serial console, but I was so
disgusted I gave up and ran NetBSD instead (on a sun4c, which doesn't help
you much).

> > NetBSD has a very mature development of raidframe and softupdates, no
> > logging filesystem though.   I had a momentary lapse of reason and
> > pondered porting XFS to NetBSD, but then I woke up.

I'll second the nomination of raidframe. I'm running it right now with
OpenBSD on an IPX w/4 2 Gig Barracudas, NFS exporting my home directory as
well as running samba and netatalk, all with no problems. Occasionally
slow, especially through netatalk, but I'm not streaming video to it
either.

-Neil

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"There is more to life than increasing its speed." | Neil McNeight
                        -Mahatma Gandhi            | mcneight at umich.edu
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