I have two main projects: a fork of irixboot, at
https://github.com/unxmaal/irixboot/ , and irix_ansible, at
https://github.com/unxmaal/irix_ansible/ .
The combined goal of these two projects is to allow a user to automatically deploy and configure a full IRIX installation to a bare-metal SGI system with minimal (or no) user intervention.
Currently irixboot has a few gaps where user input is required:
- User has to boot the SGI into PROM, format drive, and run inst
- User has to provide inst with media locations fixed with auto-generated selections file yesterday
- User has to interact with inst to complete install, rqsall, and reboot
- User has to login as EZSetup, or at least root, to
- configure networking
- install wget, openssh, python from bundles copied to /tmp by inst
- enable sshd
At this point, irix_ansible can take over and complete the remaining configuration tasks, including tasks for security, nekoware, and remote x11.
My current thoughts on how to solve the networking/ssh/python gap is to have irixboot's ansible generate the required networking and init scripts, then package them into a small tardist that irixboot would include as one of the installation media.
This would allow IRIX to start for the first time with a properly-configured network and with sshd running as a service.
I've searched quite a bit for new or old Linux-compatible software that can create a tardist file. At this point I don't believe there is any. I did find 'epm' that claims to create tardists, but on further investigation requires 'gendist', which only exists on IRIX.
I've done some crude examinations of extracted tardists, and they seem to consist of at least 3 files:
- <package name>: binary, with some files listed
- <package name>.idb: list of file paths and their offset location in the .sw file
- <package name>.sw: large file that appears to be a concatenation of all of the actual files in the package
Any resources or guidance would be much appreciated.
If I've gone down a dark path here, and there's a better way to transfer some files to an installation target (and perhaps execute them!) during install time, please let me know!
