Re: [9front]

[thinktankworkspaces@gmail.com]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1642 bytes --]

Super frustrating. I'm sure I'm making it more difficult

I tried following 4.2.2.1

It seems like things should be easier. 9bootfat, 9pc, ini and 9front.iso. I think the frustrating part was being stuck dealing with a
usb device. I don't care about thumb drives. All of this should
be accomplished with an iso or 9front.bin or something similar. 

I ended up doing a dd from /dev/SDUxxx -of cd.iso 

But it was exactly 32G image. I have a limitation because its on 
AWS with an EBS of 32G maximum. 

In theory I should have been mount the ISO and dump the data, then
modify ini. But how in the world do you write the mbr you can't do 
that to a directory

disk/mbr -r mbr /dev/sdUxxx

So really I'm not sure how iso's are created in 9front. I suspect
some sort of rockridge format and a generic bootloader.

Here is what I ended up doing. I fired up qemu locally and performed
the install. Then I logged in and changed the ini file and added
console=0. Then I copied the 9front.img to the AWS ec2 instance. 
Everything came up fine text mode. Nice! and thak you for the help.

Honestly I would like to use the ec2 bare metal. Its already a 
hypervisor. I just don't know what to do to make that happen. I 
suspect I would need to dump the data into another EBS then force
the EC2 to load it. But i'm also not sure of the files required
beyond digging into inst/start and looking at the rc scripts. 

Or a docker would be nice. I saw a docker out there but it was two 
years old. It also ran on alpine linux, so someone manged to copy 
some files over. Maybe I don't want docker. Bare metal is better any thoughts would be much appreciated. 

[-- Attachment #2: Type: message/rfc822, Size: 4587 bytes --]

From: sirjofri <sirjofri+ml-9front@sirjofri.de>
To: 9front@9front.org
Subject: Re: [9front]
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2022 23:33:38 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <89cc4583-2f86-49f0-98b6-69dec8c45816@sirjofri.de>


10.01.2022 18:25:59 thinktankworkspaces@gmail.com:

> Okay this is where it get confusing. So I suspect I mount the 
> 9front-xxxx=i386.iso. Which is generally in read only mode. Copy the 
> contents into another directory and edit the plan9.ini file. Then
> repackage the iso with the altered .ini file and reset the boot
> record? Now I have a new but modified iso that has console=0. I can
> then try to install it on my target remote system via ssh/

I guess after dd'ing the iso to a usb drive you can just edit the 
plan9.ini file in the fat directory. It's not so easy when having to deal 
with CDs for obvious reasons.

However, you should have luck with mounting a copy of the iso, changing 
the file (and saving the iso), then overwriting the first sector(s) with 
the contents of the original iso. Make soure you don't overwrite the FAT 
and contents, the partition tables should be the same anyways.

It's also possible to generate a fresh iso with your settings if you have 
an installed 9front system. You wouldn't need to run sysupdates after 
installation, but this is definitely more work.

Disclaimer: I never did any of these things with 9front.

Good luck

sirjofri