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

[David A. Paul paulda@cat.com]

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. :-)