On Aug 7, 2005, at 2:46 PM, J.C. Roberts wrote:
Floppy drives and diskettes are notorious for failing in very strange
and unusual ways. Check out the mild but insightful message from Art
on tech@ if you want to know the general consensus on floppies.
That's good to know. Unfortunately, most of my machines (mac) don't
have serial ports. My other sparc box is the reason I'm trying to
configure this one: it stopped responding to the serial port and
keyboard, it displays only a blank white screen on the monitor, and
the ethernet port that didn't have all inbound services pf-blocked
died on me, so I can't ssh into it. It's my NAT/firewall, and,
though I have no way of getting into or out of the box, it's still
running, and I don't want to risk powering it down until I have a
replacement configured. :-/
So, going with the idea that "floppies are just unreliable," I seem
to have three options:
1. Use the floppy to boot, exit the installer, and install and
configure manually (it doesn't seem to crash when I ftp tarballs in,
but crashes regularly when I use the installer to do it). Has anyone
written a walk-through for doing this?
2. Figure out how to configure OSX (client) as a netboot server.
3. Buy an OBSD CD, unplug the SCSI CDR drive from the running
firewall and hope it doesn't crash.
I'm eyeing option #1 right now.
