Morning Perry,I checked with Stacken, and the (physical) machine went down 2025年06月11日 due to reorganization of the rack. The machine will reappear as a vm.
Den 2025年08月03日 kl. 22:17, skrev Perry Metzger:
1. The installation guide says to get a mopd from ftp.stacken.kth.se:/pub/OS/NetBSD/mopd -- however, this machine is long dead. (I know how to build myself a mopd, but it's nice if the install documents tell the truth for a new user.)
Hm, that is the master distribution. Need to check with Stacken where it has gone today.
Might this be hosted off a NetBSD machine instead? It would assure that the package and the install instructions were maintained by the same group and would not disappear easily.
It would still be nice not to have the documentation (and hosting) depend on a third party I think?
True. boot is in ELF and boot.mop is in MOP format :-)2. The netboot/ directory that gets built these days has four files in it, boot, boot.mop, install.ram.gz, and install.ram.symbols.gz — it is unclear what install.ram.gz etc. are for. The install docs mention a netbsd.ram.gz but that's not in the directory and it isn't clear if these are the same, or what the "ram" in the name indicates.
Heh, that is probably an ancient typo. They are the same, yes.
It should be fixed in one direction or another. (Honestly I think "netbsd.ram.gz" is a better name...)
(It's also not clear what the distinction between boot and boot.mop is...)
This should be in the manual I think.
[I couldn't remember having ever had something extra, so I looked into the distributions 1.5-1.5, but no such dir existed...?3. The guide claims that there is a a directory called installation/misc that contains "Miscellaneous vax installation utilities; see installation section below." -- this directory does not appear to exist and no further reference is made to it.I wonder it did exist at some point long ago; there's all sorts of standalone utilities we shipped for most ports 30 years ago to aid in installation. The process used to be that after the release got auto-built that the portmaster would copy those things in to the release. (This lack of automation was probably a mistake and was probably my fault.)
That directory have never existed. I assume that text have appeared in some aligning of the install docs with some other port.
It's entirely possible we never shipped such things. I will note that the sys/arch/vax directory does seem to have some standalone utilities and similar things in it. Perhaps some were only in 4.4.
[Two questions about the Vax installation guide...