Installing a Plan 9 PC network... some probs...

Installing a Plan 9 PC network... some probs...

[Brandon]

Well.... I have beat my head against the wall long enough (several hours)
trying to get plan 9 going on my own.. but I think I'm gonna need a little
help before I get it right...

I pretty much installed per the instructions for Installing Plan 9 from
the Documents book... quick synopsis:

Made fileserver boot disk, slammed cdrom stuff into fileserver's scsi disk.
"Made this PC an authentication server"
and did the little dance (exactly per the book, except for userid's +
passwords) for setting up the authid, etc... on the fileserver and
the authserver.
Then I also added a normal user on the file and auth servers, and added
a terminal entry to /lib/ndb/local.  I was able to log into my terminal
as my normal username just fine, and everything on all three machines was
going pretty ok.

At this point I can reboot the cpu/auth server and the terminal with
no problems or errors, but a question arises regarding the cpu server's
booting up:

<1> The book says "Later convert the cpu server to boot from a local disk"
Someone please explain the concept and/or process involved here, which
I assume leads to _not_ having to boot DOS to load the cpu kernel, and/or
provides some convenient way to store the IP addresses so that booting
can be a little more automatic.....

Other than the inconvenience of the cpu server bootup process, I was going
fine.. so I tried rebooting the file server (and everything else)...
the file server came up fine, but the cpu server complained something
close to:
Can't connect to auth server: no method for accessing file.

I was still typing in the IP info on the cpu server's bootup as before,
including setting the auth server to 0.0.0.0.  After redoing this process
a few times, I narrowed down the cause: Everything works fine if I put the
fileserverin "allow" mode, but If I boot the file server normally ("secure
mode"?) thats when the cpu server panics on bootup with the message above.

Any answers, pointers, clues, trails, or large moentary donations would be
appreciated.

				Brandon 




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Installing a Plan 9 PC network... some probs...

[forsyth]

today's topical tip from:

	try 0.1.0.0 instead of 0.0.0.0 (which won't work) or
	the cpu/auth server's own address (which will work, but
	takes a little while to time out).

	0.1.0.0 does what 0.0.0.0 would do if it worked
	(which it doesn't)

Installing a Plan 9 PC network... some probs...

[David]

Sounds like you have many problems like I had.



> 
> I pretty much installed per the instructions for Installing Plan 9 from
> the Documents book... quick synopsis:

Make sure to follow the web site instructions, not the book. Especially
don't follow both; intermixing instructions will result in chaos.


> 
> At this point I can reboot the cpu/auth server and the terminal with
> no problems or errors, but a question arises regarding the cpu server's
> booting up:
> 
> <1> The book says "Later convert the cpu server to boot from a local disk"
> Someone please explain the concept and/or process involved here, which
> I assume leads to _not_ having to boot DOS to load the cpu kernel, and/or
> provides some convenient way to store the IP addresses so that booting
> can be a little more automatic.....

I wanted to boot from a floppy and have the cpu server be diskless.
However,
 I an extra IDE disk to install the cpu kernel. I hardly ever shut this
server down.

> 
> Other than the inconvenience of the cpu server bootup process, I was going
> fine.. so I tried rebooting the file server (and everything else)...
> the file server came up fine, but the cpu server complained something
> close to:
> Can't connect to auth server: no method for accessing file.
> 
> I was still typing in the IP info on the cpu server's bootup as before,
> including setting the auth server to 0.0.0.0. 

If you notice on the web site instructions:

"You are now faced with a chicken an eggproblem. When you are asked for
the IP address of the authentication server, type this system's IP
address. Since it won't be able to connect to itself, it will eventually
give up and assume that its authid/key pair is the same as the file
server's when authenticating with the file server."

Not 0.0.0.0


Good luck. :-)