Introduction
I decided that I want to put up an installation server for IRIX,
and I decided to use a Linux box for some reasons for this job.
Unfortunately I found out that configuartion of this server as
an installation server was not so simple, plus there is a really
nasty trick to get it work.
Server Prerequisites
Your Linux server at least needs a BOOTP or a combined
DHCP/BOOTP server, an rsh server and a tftp server.
I use a DHCP server that does its job as a BOOTP server fine.
This documentation will explain how to setup the DHCP server,
as most Linux-systems do have a combined DHCP/BOOTP server.
Configuring BOOTP/DHCP
Our Linux-server is called "ennyah"
and our SGI box is called "michelangelo".
Again we need the hardware MAC adress of the SGI, in our case
its 08:00:69:0b:29:8c. We then need to edit the
file /etc/dhcpd.conf on the Linux server in order
to fill in the adress of our host. The following example shows
the entry for the SGI machine, you probably also need to enter
host michelangelo {
hardware ethernet 08:00:69:0b:29:8c;
fixed-address michelangelo;
server-name "ennyah";
} |
Note that in this example, the Linux server is able to resolve
the machine name michelangelo to its IP adress. If this is not
the case, your DHCP configuration might look like this:
host 192.168.1.24 {
hardware ethernet 08:00:69:0b:29:8c;
fixed-address 192.168.1.24;
server-name "ennyah";
} |
After adding these lines to your /etc/dhcpd.conf
file, you need to restart the DHCP server, probably by typing
>> /etc/init.d/dhcpd stop &&
/etc/init.d/dhcpd start
Refer to your Linux documentation, the starting/stopping of daemons
is quite different from one Linux distribution to another.
Configuring the rsh-Server
First you have to add the IP address of the SGI workstation in
thefile /etc/hosts.equiv
# /etc/hosts.equiv: list of hosts and users that are granted "trusted"
# r-command access to your system.
michelangelo
ennyah |
In our case the SGI boxs name is "michelangelo"
and I also added the servers name "ennyah"
itself for testing purpose.
Second you have to (or at least you should) create a new user,
I named him instsrv. This is usually done with the adduser
command.
>> adduser instsrv
It is wise to lock this account, then no direct login is possible,
but rsh will still do its job fine. But it is important that this
user uses /bin/sh as his login-shell, or the installation
might fail!
Third you have to create a .rhosts file in the
home directory of the newly added user instsrv and grant access
from the SGI box as user root to this account. This is done by
adding the following lines to the file .rhosts
# ~/.rhosts: list of hosts and users that are granted "trusted"
# r-command access to your system as this user.
michelangelo root
ennyah root |
Again I also added the installation server itself for testing
purpose. Now you can test the setup on the server by typing
>> rsh -l instsrv
This should give you a shell as user instsrv, you can
check this by typing whoami, which should return
"instsrv".
Chosing the right Shell
As I already mentioned, it is important that the new user instsrv
has the login shell /bin/sh and not for example
/bin/bash or /bin/csh. Unfortunately
inmany modern Linux distributions /bin/sh simply
is a link to /bin/bash. You have to correct this,
and point the link to a korn shell, for example by typing
>> cd /bin
>> ln -s ksh sh
WARNING!
Actually I found out that changing the target of the
link /bin/sh from /bin/bash
to /bin/ksh may break some system scripts,
inlcuding some boot-up scripts! So it might be wise to
relink the file with its original target after the installation
has finished. |
Starting the Installation
Now you finally can start the installation on your SGI. Simply
go into the PROM and chosie "Install Software", then
chose "From Network". Enter the IP adress, then the
directory where the file sa can be found (this
file is included with the first disc of any overlays, it is not
included with the base installation CDs of IRIX 6.5). The installation
process should start now, if you experience any problems see below.
From inst, you can access the server via
inst> open instsrv@192.168.1.6:/majix/install/IRIX-base-6.5
where instsrv is the name of the new user account created
for remote installation, 192.168.1.6 is the adress
of the server and /majix/install/IRIX-base-6.5
is the path of the installation directory. Probably you have more
than one.
The Trick to get it work
It seems that the tftp-Implementation in the PROM of SGIs or
the TCP/IP-stack in the PROM has some problems with an automatic
PMTU (Path Maximum Transfer Unit) discovery algorithm used by
many Linux systems. This has to be disabled in order to get tftp
work by typing (as root)
>> echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_no_pmtu_disc
After the installation is finished, you can reset this flag by
typing
>> echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_no_pmtu_disc
If you still have some problems, it might be the case that the
TFTP server is using a local port number of 32768 or higher -
this may also cause some problems, but this can also be handeled
by typing
>> echo 2048 32767 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range
and the default value can be restored by typing
>> echo 32768 61000 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range
Good luck, at least these tricks worked for me!
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