[ydl-gen] YDL 5 installation on Xserve

[Jeffrey Fox]

This may not be relevant but I have a cluster of Xserve G4's and couldn't
install YDL-5.0.2 using either the CD's or (of course) the DVD. Terrasoft
recommended that I install via http by putting the YDL file in my pub
directory and just using boot.iso to boot the Xserves (which they do). I
used YDL 5.0.2 on my Powerbook Ti G4 and set up the Appache server.
(Terrasoft did a very nice job for those of us that don't know much about
web servers. Almost all the work is done.)

It worked like a charm. Once I got YDL 5.0.2 on the mother node I just set
up the mother node as a web server and then installed YDL on the rest of the
nodes.  For my work, YDL 5.0.2 has been a godsend.

PS: You can't use Mac OSX for this since it clips the file names.
-- 
Jeffrey S Fox
Professor
Department of Mathematics
Center for Neuroscience
University of Colorado
395 UCB
Boulder CO 80309-0395
303 492 6418
jfox at euclid.colorado.edu




On 9/5/07 8:28 PM, "Bill Fink" <billfink at mindspring.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Atro Tossavainen wrote:
> 
>>> I'd install YDL 5.0.2 onto an external FireWire drive,
>> 
>> Easier said than done.  YDL 5.0.2 refuses to recognize the external
>> FireWire drive (a Maxtor 5000DV) as anything it will agree to install
>> to.  I've tried having the drive connected when I boot the machine
>> as well as plugging it in afterwards; I've disconnected the internal
>> IDE hard drives; I've made sure that sbp2 is loaded, that I see the
>> kernel messages related to plugging in the drive, and I've even hand-
>> made the b,8,0 /dev entry for sda (which YDL didn't create when it
>> loaded sbp2 and the drive was present) so I could run pdisk on it.
>> Everything is working fine as far as the hardware goes.  YDL just
>> won't play with me.
>> 
>> I suppose I haven't tried hand-loading sd_mod yet...
>> 
>> But this is supposed to be Apple...  Easy to work with and no Linux
>> nerd tweaking required, right? :-)
> 
> Ya, it should be easier, but unfortunately it often isn't.  It seems
> you're a fair ways along if you've been able to use pdisk to partition
> the external FireWire disk.  You may also need to manually format
> the boot partition with hformat, the swap partition with mkswap, and
> the root partition with mkfs (or mkfs.ext3).  Then you need to mount
> the root partition where the installer expects to find it (it's been
> quite a while since I played these kinds of fun and games so I don't
> recall what the installer uses as a mount point).  I haven't actually
> tried a 5.0.2 install so can't personally vouch for any of this, but
> if you can get this far, then you would just continue the install to
> install all the desired RPM packages.  After that you could chroot
> into the installed system, edit the /etc/yaboot.conf file as described
> in the HOWTO, run "ybin -v", and finally hopefully reboot to the
> external FireWire disk.  You could then use that as a platform to
> construct a bootable root file system on the internal RAID disks.
> 
> -Good luck
> 
> -Bill
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