[weblacky]

So this is a little bit out of my wheelhouse, I always use manual CDROM loading on my stuff just because I have many external SCSI CD/DVD drives and my network is not hybridized to properly set up for loading or automation of Irix installs (eventually).

Most old stations use BOOTP instead of DHCP at the PROM to autoconfig anything. There are of course PROM commands to set a static IP address as well as a file location if you're doing network based BOOTP file fetching.

If you're using the LOVE utility to do network installs, read here: https://github.com/ColinLaws/love

Just so you're aware while SGI did support network installs the machines generally did not anticipate needing network at their firmware level or much during boot. The actual interface "up" occurs later in the kernel start up then you might expect, after say using systems like Linux. Most people would use local media unless you were part of a lab or a large infrastructure and spent the money for a network share and to set up the automation. Outside of booting and installing you can't do anything else with the network on an SGI in its firmware modes. You can't update firmware using the network. So most of the time you're talking local volumes. Network setup is not terribly bad for doing remote OS installs, but it's going to be command based and very few if any of the prompts are going to be graphical.

One thing to keep in mind as you go through the various items with the system as these were not designed to be user-friendly. They were not designed to be as well-rounded as a PC bios was with its options and date selections and all that. They're better off being considered specialty pieces of equipment that you were supposed to have a service contract and you were supposed to call SGI on your service contract for anything you needed. For a lot of things a tech would come out to do the work themselves instead of anyone from the business. Unless you're running a lab where you could afford to screw up, if you only had one or two of the systems and they had to keep working you may not even trust an employee to do it. You'd have SGI come out with a field technician to do the upgrade or the patches that are needed and then claim that everything is ready to go and then hand it back to the operator. You're going to run across quite a few things both at the hardware setup level and at the OS install level that you would've thought you wouldn't have to do or should be much easier, this is because a field tech was supposed to do this job and not the owner. So just consider that some of these things will be obtuse or difficult the first time you do them because you weren't ever supposed to do them. The product isn't as well-rounded as your average PC, certain things didn't need to be user-friendly because the user wasn't supposed to be doing them. OS Installation is one of those things.

I'm not saying it's hard for anyone that's installed Linux before, but if you've only installed an operating system like Windows or MacOS you would definitely be caught up in a few of the steps.

When it comes to the L1 and text PROM interface, yeah they fight, I've always felt it was mainly because both of them were waiting for input and so there appears to be activity that forces one to the other. Yes there is a way apparently go permanently go back to L1, but I've only used that on a graphical PROM... You're using a serial terminal PROM.

I see that your system only carries a single serial port, the workstations don't do this and have multiple ports and so they tend to spread out over a separate terminal for each interface, the way I use them. I have seen what you're talking about with it jumping back-and-forth and the best I could really say is we don't normally need to fiddle with the L1 when you're in PROM... I'd sort of forget about it being useful.

So I would just acknowledge that you can issue a single command really fast from PROM to the L1 by doing the terminal switch but in reality I just consider it kind of unusable. The only reason to access L1 from PROM would be to check your ENV tables, which if you go fast you can do.

Another word of advice on the installation of Irix, when using FX to partition, don't use AUTO and don't use the [FOR]MAT command. It doesn't do what you think it does. Use the manual methods outlined in the guides you'll read. I can explain why but just don't...you won't like what happens as you won't be expecting it.