[Docter60]

Hello all,

Most (if not all) forum posts or pages I have come across only discuss netbooting an IRIX or OS installer, not the OS itself. I've tuned unxmaal's booterizer to my liking and can install IRIX to internal drives no problem.  My question is this:

Is it possible to boot an SGI machine using an IRIX OS on a network drive? If so, how? Ideally I'd like to have the file system hosted on a raspberry pi or something and the SGI use the system for operation. I specifically have an Octane, but would be curious if other machines are capable, if any.

Thank you

[robespierre]

Yes. You need to follow the procedures for creating a diskless client. There is an entire manual on just this subject.
Of course, it is specific to SGI systems as that is what they supported, but it will work on any server with NFS and bootp/tftp.
https://techpubs.jurassic.nl/manuals/053...index.html

[Docter60]

Oh, fantastic! Thank you very much for the help!

[Raion]

My notes on this:

I've done a diskless before, but only with an IRIX host. I think other systems may be possible but ultimately unreliable, especially Linux or macOS. My personal experience has been these are difficult to configure properly for netboots, and that NetBSD and Solaris/illumos are better hosts. DINA is NetBSD-based notably.

My main concern is going to be authentication and hiccups because of the differences in implementations. You might find that you can get an initial connection for Linux or macOS working but a reliable connection is probably going to be very difficult; Solaris happens to have a very excellent NFS3 and RPC stack which is simply not rivaled by others. On Linux in particular NFS3 is in my experience very difficult to get consistent results out of.

This is of course anecdotal. But I spent a lot of time in the last year or two trying to make more tutorials for Linux and basically gave up because I didn't have the ability to get replicable results. I was however able to get them with netBSD and illumos.

Good luck getting this working and I'll be watching this thread to see how it goes.

[Docter60]

Okay firstly, thank you Raion for your reply, any and all info on the matter is much appreciated!  After a weekend of brainstorming, troubleshooting, and testing, I have a raspberry pi that can both net install IRIX and net boot IRIX to the Octane.  I don't exactly know how stable it is yet for long sessions, but I can at least bring myself to the root's desktop and shut down properly.

My setup procedure is the following (briefly):  The Octane is set up as a mock diskless server where the dskless_server subsystem is installed along with all the /var/boot programs.  The pi provides an NFS directory where the diskless tree will be installed to.  After mounting the nfs directory on the Octane, I go through the processes described in the diskless guide to create a share tree and client tree catered for the Octane.  After installation, I took note of how the Octane's local configuration files for exports, hosts, bootparams, and inetd.conf were changed.  I also had to check the client tree's /etc/hosts because the Octane put 127.0.1.1 instead of the LAN IP.  Rebooting and changing the PROM variables resulted in a lot of trouble, but lots of reconfiguring eventually got it working.

Right now I'm using nfs-kernel-server with NFS2 and 3 enabled only. I had a problem where bootparamd was sending back resolved IP addresses from the pi's /etc/hosts instead of the hostname (this, again, sent 127.0.1.1 instead of the LAN IP), so I just used the IP address in the bootparams configuration file.

Currently I feel that the setup is in a "proof of concept" state, meaning it is messy but attainable. So I'll be continuing to polish and test more in the near future.  I also just revived an Indy, so that will be another machine to test on.

[Raion]

Sounds good. Congratulations. I'll be interested in documentation for this in detail.

[Docter60]

Okay, I've made a rough guide on how I pulled it off on github.  Any corrections/issues/additions wanted for the docs are welcome.

[Linux-RISC]

Thank you, Docter60. I'm working to add this functionality to Reanimator and I'm using your documentation to polish some configurations.

I have booted my Indy on network using a RBPi+Reanimator as NAS and I have some remarks/questions:
- I have used my Octane2 as server, like you, to generate share and client directories
- I prefer to generate the installation on the local disk and to use tar to backup and transfer to RBPi using scp, the generation over network is still slower
- Using a SD card on RBPi is very slow, and the SD card loses write cycles
- I'm working on booting Indy using bootp on RBPi but moving the storage to a NAS (a GNU/Linux thin client) to increase the general speed

Questions:
- Indy booted showing a simple window manager and I couldn't shut it down, a missing file error is displayed and I shutdown executing "shutdown -g0 -p -y", have you experimented the same problems?
- What are these lines used for? I think they are useless:
6.5.22  root=192.168.1.23:/srv/tftp/diskless/share/6.5.22 \
        sbin=192.168.1.23:/srv/tftp/diskless/share/6.5.22/sbin \
        swap=192.168.1.23:
5.3    root=192.168.1.23:/srv/tftp/diskless/share/5.3 \
        sbin=192.168.1.23:/srv/tftp/diskless/share/5.3/sbin \
        swap=192.168.1.23:

               

On shutdown:
       

[stormy]

Very interesting, I wonder how the disk read/write performance is when the SGI is fitted with a gigabit network card and the server also has gigabit. It would be interesting if this beats the performance of some SCSI-2-SD solutions.

[Docter60]

Thank you, Docter60. I'm working to add this functionality to Reanimator and I'm using your documentation to polish some configurations.

I have booted my Indy on network using a RBPi+Reanimator as NAS and I have some remarks/questions:
- I have used my Octane2 as server, like you, to generate share and client directories
- I prefer to generate the installation on the local disk and to use tar to backup and transfer to RBPi using scp, the generation over network is still slower
- Using a SD card on RBPi is very slow, and the SD card loses write cycles
- I'm working on booting Indy using bootp on RBPi but moving the storage to a NAS (a GNU/Linux thin client) to increase the general speed

Questions:
- Indy booted showing a simple window manager and I couldn't shut it down, a missing file error is displayed and I shutdown executing "shutdown -g0 -p -y", have you experimented the same problems?
- What are these lines used for? I think they are useless:
6.5.22  root=192.168.1.23:/srv/tftp/diskless/share/6.5.22 \
        sbin=192.168.1.23:/srv/tftp/diskless/share/6.5.22/sbin \
        swap=192.168.1.23:
5.3    root=192.168.1.23:/srv/tftp/diskless/share/5.3 \
        sbin=192.168.1.23:/srv/tftp/diskless/share/5.3/sbin \
        swap=192.168.1.23:



On shutdown:

Oh, replies. I don't check back here often, apologies.

For the first question, can't say I have had that exact problem. The first solution I attempted was actually what you described (local tree generation then transferring)!  Tar-ing everything kind of screwed up the files somehow for me...so that might be what's happening.

As for the second question, yeah they kind of are useless.  They're only useful if you plan on creating network classes for your machines.  Those lines are essentially just pasted over from the bootparams file generated by the mock server.