[9fans] Experiences Installing Version 3: Another Take

["James G. Stallings II" <alteridentity@yahoo.com>]

Greetings, fellow users of the oracle that is USEnet!

This post chronicles my adventures installing and (mis)configuring the
latest release of plan9 (R3). I will summarize it as follows: as usual,
getting the hardware to work is 98% of success. Of course, you have to
be able to tell it (plan9) what and where the hardware is, but that's
the other two percent, huh :)

Once I'd cobbled together the parts for a suitably old machine to set it
up on, I got the baseline hardware working and was able to boot to the
graphic install. The old dog is built up as follows:

486DX2 66 from Cyrix on an unknown MB w 32M ram
512M Conner HD (IDE)
36x CDROM
LinkSys Ether16CT 10BT ethernet
std 1.4M floppy
SB16 audio
std kb
2 button ser mouse
Speedstar64 VGA with about 511K of memory on it (some of the pixels drop
out ;^)

Initial installs were done via locally-burned CD. The fifth and final
install was performed over the ether and is installed on a native plan9
fat on the disk (it's the only partition).

As I summarized, getting the hardware right has been most of the battle
so far. This would have been no different for any other O/S. Getting the
right VGA settings was nontrivial enough to educate me concerning
getting the ethernet right.  Jim (jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com) was an
especially valuable resource here as well - Thanks Amigo!

Now I have it pretty well going, except for a few issues involving
networking. Can someone tell a bonehead how to configure the /lib/nbd/
for a small lan? The net is like this:

1 win95 box named tor at 192.168.1.4
1 dual boot win95/redhat box named nitro at 192.168.1.1
1 debian server named plastique at 192.168.1.2
1 winnt portable named dock  at 192.168.1.3
1 standalone plan9 box named plan9 at 192.168.1.7
gateway is 192.168.1.254
dns is 151.164.1.7 and 151.164.1.8

the plan9 box (for now) needs to be everything plan9 on the lan (cpu
server, file server and terminal)

I'd be happy to share my current /lib/ndb/local* and /lib/ndb/common
with you except that in my feeble attempts to configure it I've blown
the box off the 'net.

I know it's not a device problem cause it werked just fine when I
downloaded the distribution archive.
Plus it was pingable until  I munged with /lib/nbd/*

Thanks in advance for any assists!

Cheers!
James