Re: [9fans] Questions: plan9.ini; NE2000

["Russ Cox" <rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com>]

  1. Any docs available on the syntax and options for the plan9.ini file?

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/8/plan9.ini

  2. I have a Novell NE2000. It gets detected on boot but when I set up IP
  address, netmask and gateway to download the distribution from the Net,
  nothing happens. The box just sits there, no network traffic at all. Are
  there config restrictions on the card or something? As I said, it _does_
  get detected. It's IRQ 9 and (I recall) 0x320 for the card address.

Perhaps the IRQ is set wrong; perhaps you need the nodummyrr option.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/errata.html

  3. Any docs on what gets written to the floppy after the initial boot? I
  find that if I start with a freshly formatted floppy, dd the image to it,
  it'll boot and start the install process fine, but the _second_ time I get
  messages similar to "boot device:". Choosing fd0!9PCFLOP.GZ seems to start
  the process but then I get a kernel panic.

What gets written to the floppy?  vgainfo.txt at boot time, and 9inst.cnf if you finish or stop.

  The maddening thing here is that even if I take the floppy to a DOS
  machine and remove the .nvr file that gets created, and reset all the
  files to their initial contents, that the floppy won't boot into the
  install properly again. Even re-doing the dd of the image onto the floppy
  and booting from it gives me the unworkable "boot from:" prompt.

The .nvr file is part of the original boot image; don't remove it.
Managing _all_ the files on the floppy using DOS is not necessarily
a good idea either.  9load and root.vd need to be contiguous on
the disk, and if DOS rewrites them, this might not be the case.
They don't change anyway.  It is, of course, safe to rewrite
plan9.ini and vgadb to your heart's content.

  The only solution is to completely reformat the floppy (using fdformat
  under Linux), and re-copying the boot image. Then a boot of the floppy
  will start the normal install process again.

There's something amiss in the Plan 9 floppy driver.
It seems more likely that you did something differently
when booting after using Linux to format the disk.
In particular, some people have found that a cold
boot is necessary; others have found that disabling
any other floppy drives in the BIOS helps.

If it turns out that it is the floppy image which is corrupted
(i.e. the floppy doesn't boot using exactly the same procedure
that it used to boot), I'd appreciate it if you could send me 
a copy of the image (from dd or something).

Russ