[rescue] SGI Impact 10000

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Quoth Jonathan C. Patschke ...
> On Thu, 16 Aug 2007, Robert Darlington wrote:
> 
> > Oh god, I forgot about the installer.  I used to do it 
> > every few days
> > at a previous job but I remember the first time.  I remember it took
> > several sessions involving profanity.  I would never wish it on
> > somebody that hasn't worked with another admin.
> 
> If you do network installs, you can mitigate a lot of that.  I
> disremember the specifics, but I moved all the dist files into one NFS
> share and modified some of the rules files so that exactly 
> what I wanted
> installed would be selected by "install default ; go".  That greatly
> reduced my interactions with miniroot inst and eliminated the most
> irritating part of the installation:  shoving disc after disc at the
> machine repeatedly.

Over the last six years, I've done just enough IRIX installations to have
some practice, but not quite enough to get good at it or to make it
worthwhile setting up an installation server.  I do have the various updates
and freeware/nekoware stuff on NFS, though.

I once had a six-disk CD-ROM changer I thought would make a dandy installer
for IRIX.  I envisioned that plus a bootable CD-ROM drive, a couple of SCSI
cables and some duct tape ... in the event, either the changer was broken or
SGI's SCSI controller detested it.  Once connected to the computer, the
changer changed disks continuously.  Oh, well.

Another thought was to make a bootable DVD with a whole base 6.5.0
installation set ... but the boot disks have to be EFS, which might be a
problem for a DVD, even if I could decipher the instructions for making a
bootable IRIX disk.  Which I can't.

So, the last time I installed IRIX, on an O2, I just shoved disks at it like
a monkey.

-Shel