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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.hawaii.edu!ames!enews.sgi.com!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!torn!nott!nntp.igs.net!usenet From: cskinner@bml.ca (Chris K. Skinner) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,list.freebsd-questions,local.freebsd.questions Subject: RE: routed timing out my LAN card so tcp/ip seems not to work. Date: Sat, 25 May 1996 21:49:06 GMT Organization: Bytown Marine Limited, Nepean/Kanata, Ont, Canada Lines: 327 Message-ID: <4o7vfb$m0h@nntp.igs.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: ttya2d.ott.igs.net X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.0.82 At 10:54 AM 5/23/96 -0700, David Smith wrote: >Hi my name is David Smith, and I caught a few articles >that you posted in the freebsd news group. I have been >lurking here for awhile. I have a good computer >Penteum133 with 4 gigs of HD and 32 megs of ram, and >am running win95. I want to put unix on a 600 meg >partition, but am cluless as to how to go about it. I >was at first looking at LINUX, but then I read that it >was not compatable with a Diamond video card, so now I >am looking at freebsd as my solution. Can you give me >any help or advice on this. I have a ppp net acount >that gives me shell access and my isp is using freebsd >too, so I am getting pretty familure with it. I know I >can get the CDROM from cdrom.com and will if that is >the way to go. I am 46 and completely deaf. I also >have been stuck in bed for almost two years with a >broken back and spend about 15 hours a day on the net >keeping busy. The unix is a plan to keep my mind >active and not go nuts. So that's my story what do ya >think my course should be. Thanks for any and all >help you may give me. David > >-- >Regards >David Smith >http://www.calweb.com/~davids Hi. I bought a 2-CD set known as FreeBSD 4.4 v2.1.0 January 1996 published by Walnut Creek of www.cdrom.com What follows are my own experiences and babbling: I happen to have 2 Toshiba SCSI CD-Rom drives, an Adaptec AHA-1542C SCSI controller, an AHA-2842 VLB SCSI controller, an Always IN2000 ISA SCSI controller, Sound Blaster-16ASP, Gravis Ultrasound Max, NCR-based 8-bit HP ScanJet IIcx SCSI controller, 14.4kbps internal PC Logic Modem, a US Robotics 33.6 kbps Sportster internal modem, 3 Quantum 540 Mbyte Lightning EIDE hard disks, 1 Micropolis 1.7 Gbyte MC1548 SCSI hard disk, WD31200 1.2 Gbyte Caviar WD hard disk, WD31600 1.6 Gbyte Caviar WD hard disk, 2 Seagate ST32140A 2.1 Gbyte hard disks. With all of this stuff at my disposal, I was bound to be able to get some configuration going! I bought the second of my 2.1 Gbyte Seagate ST32140A EIDE hard disks and planned to put FreeBSD thereon. I used the fdisk portion of the install to install 3 partitions of FreeBSD. First 440 Mbytes, second 800 Mbytes and third whatever remained. Then deleted the first and third, leaving the second partition intact. My plan was to install DOS/Ms-Windows on the first 440 Mbyte and FreeBSD on the middle partition and Linux on the last partition. FreeBSD was said to fit into 700 Mbytes, but this did not work with the default label program setups. This label program portions up your partition into swp, / root, /usr, /var and such. During the install I ran out of one of the 4 or 5 labeled portions of the FreeBSD partition. It probably had to be measured out and proportioned from experience. I think that it was the /var labeled portion, but do not recollect clearly at this point. I clearly remember that there was only 30 Mbytes allocated, so I multiplied that amount by 10 and allocated 300 Mbytes for that darned part. (I get a kick out of people when they write in about installing to a hard disk that is less than the size of some of my files, or label segments: like "Can I install to a 100 Mbyte hard disk?"--ya, right, I've got that in RAM!--Go out and spend some money on a new hard drive--they'll be a bit more reliable than some old rinky-dink junker drive! and it'll boost the economy.) Before this re-install point, I also tried to install the Linux partition that I had planned from a Fall 1994 Yggdrasil Boot diskette and CD-Rom. This software would not recognize my AHA-1542C at i/o 0x130 or my CD drive and otherwise default irq settings. There probably was some LILO loader startup input string that I should have been able to use but did not want to pour through manuals to find that the info that I needed was not documented, so I forgot about even trying to get Linux loaded, and concentrated on getting FreeBSD going instead, since it recognized all the stuff that I had minimally put into the PC that I was configuring: no sound card, AHA-1542C, Seagate 2.1 Gbyte EIDE hard disk, Trident 9400CXi VLB 1 Mb video card, EIDE Pine enhanced multi I/O controller w/dual 16550A serial ports, 14.4 kbps PC Logic Modem on Com3 irq5, Intel EtherExpress16 LAN card at 0x300, irq 10, 32 kbytes memory mapped RAM at 0xD8000. I would have practically have given up on FreeBSD if it were not for the "visual" install mode that can become active after you use "-c" enter on the floppy boot prompt and later issue the visual command! Mind you, there were a few points in time when I made an entry error on some previous screen during several of my install attempts that made me wish the install screens had a "go back to previous screen button" built-into them. It was after Linux would not install gracefully, that I decided to fill both the FreeBSD and Linux disk space with only FreeBSD! Hopefully, it would not run out of disk space--but it did because of only 30 Mbytes being allocated for /var or whatever it was. Other parts of my plans were to set up a DNS (domain name server) for the DOS/MS-Windows PCs on the RJ-45 ten based T LAN at the office and the other PCs on my Thin Wire Coax LAN at home. I wanted maximal connectivity with whatever type of LAN that I might connect with. I wanted to enable everything!--or at least whatever was required to run in either of those situations. The LAN at work has about 12 386/486 computers running IPX/SPX protocols off a Novell Netware 3.11 server and a handful of these also were running Net Beui protocol from MS-Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Being a C, C++, assembler, BASIC, Pascal, APL, awk, FORTRAN, COBOL, Foxpro, dBase, Zim, Oracle, Ingress, ... programmer, I wanted to try running and maybe programming in X-windows just to see what it was like. So I was going to install that too. After installing 5 times to try to fine-tune things, I found that I should have only done it maybe 3 or 4 times and not 5. There comes a point when the install program does not help you--it even screws up some settings that you might have done by hand in editing sessions of config files. Each of these installs took a fair length of time because of my slow 2 times CD- Rom drive (Toshiba 3401), and from this I wished that I had bought an 8 times CD-Rom just so that it would not waste so much of my time! I found that when I installed users all with no passwords except just one of them, that only the dude that I gave a password could log into the UNIX from FTP or telnet from a remote PC on my LANs--this is probably for security purposes. I also found that there is a huge need for better install software for some stuff like that in the ports/packages portion of the distribution. I particularly needed the samba package in order to do sharing of directories a la MS Windows for Workgroups but found that when I had told it to install, there was much studying of the man pages and newsgroups for info on the topic of "user / workgroup / domain" and authorization passwords for use with the package that was not eluded to during the install of the package. Even a few words like "the config file is smb.conf and it is located in the /stand directory and should, for standardization reasons, be moved to the xxx directory, plus the "user/workgroup/domain" config files are these: yyyy and zzz; and should be dealt with in a manner thus..." should have tipped me off that more work than first met the eye would be in store for me. I often wonder, "if all of this stuff has been done before by others, why could not more of it be automated quite a bit more so that we many less UNIX oriented hackers can get aboard a bit more easily with a more gentle learning curve, rather than the cliff climbing that we are faced with?" I'm afraid that the moneys that I've spent on hardware might soon be outstripped by the moneys that I've had to spend on O'Reilly UNIX books that were written in 1990-94 and have not been updated with as much frequency as might be required in this quickly changing world of high-technology. If there is a manual set for BSD 4.4, be sure that a new version of BSD is right around the corner, and as soon as you've bought your manual set, then that is when the new release is bound to come out. A couple of years back I bought a pile of X-windows books during a computer fair. I've not opened a one of them yet, but have found that even on the bookstore shelves, these books appear not to have been revised much if any from those that I bought at deep discount in the computer fair. From reading news groups, I find that the UNIX community is very big with brevity, and short on "you just press ... to get the thing to go!" They are more apt to recommend an O'Reilly book that you should buy and read. Now I've got the DNS & Bind book, the NFS & NIS book, and the Linux Network Admin Guide. Some of what I've read is not quick to the points that I want explained. When I want DNS config tables explained, they will have a numerous pages of examples of tables, but don't seem to have an intro to each table saying suppose you want to accomplish goal XXXXX, then you will have to include something called RRRRR that uses these record types to signify QQQQQ. I suppose it is just that I'm not used to or initially don't like the style with which the books might be written. They'll have to grow on me, but I don't like having to read such dry stuff from preface to index to get what I need right away. This is too time consuming. If I need to, and I've got more time on my hands, then I'll curl up in bed with one for perusal (NOT!). If I could place it into words, I'd say that the books are written almost like abstract algrebra texts. It is up to you to interpret, and bring to life in some practical application, and not necessarily to use the books in the manner that I want for myself. I could go with a little less generality and interpretation-- it hurts my dumb brain to absorb too much reading so that I can be cleaver for such a short burst of time when I type in the required configuration codings. If O'Reilly took an approach like, "if we were going to make a video or Multi-media MPEG CD on subject XYZ, then what would the screen-play read like?" Coming from an M-TV generation, cartoons, videos, sound bites, many people might benefit from a more practical approach. I'dunno, I just hate straining my eyes reading all these books on this stuff! Maybe I'm lazy and don't want to take the time required? Just a day or so ago, I noticed on the net that there is newer version of the software: BSD 4.4 v2.2. When I went to download all of the same stuff from the net that I've got on CD (but newer version), I used my shell account on my ISP's host computer. I did an ftp to the site, and set prompting off, then did an mget *. Oh-Oh! There were sub-directories of stuff that FTP was not going to auto-create on my ISP's local disk, so I had to exit FTP and create these directories manually. Ok, I started ftp up again, and boy, I was gonna have the latest and greatest up-to- date version going! I started the mget * command, and my ISP's computer system was fetching the stuff late at night at full T1 speed. The first file was 22 Mbytes, the second was 18 Mbytes, Oh-Ohh! I stopped the transfer and checked how much space my ISP's hard disk had free--I thought it was under 200 Mbytes. At that rate, they would have a fit if I even temporarily overflowed their disk and crashed their BSDI Unix v2.1 system for all their users? I had to abandon that idea of grabbing the whole thing at once. The technique that I've found that gets me the files the quickest is to download to my ISP's machine at full avalable bandwidth, then use the sz (send zmodem command) to retrieve the files to a terminal emulator program that I get running. My 33.6 kbps Sportster once had a Zmodem transfer going at 11,400 bytes per second, which is very nearly the full 115,200 bits per second rate of the COM port chip. The file was the 44 Mbyte com.zone DNS cache text file that originated at internic. I've tried this technique at different times of the day, and it doesn't always work when there's lots of users logged into the ISP's machine who might be hogging a bit of the bandwidth. My unix machine status right now is that DNS is mostly working, but not quite fully. I just bought those "DNS & Bind" and "NFS and NIS" books last night, so I'm going to investigate why my nslookup command claims that it knows the IP of the machine, yet it says that the default NS (which is the machine itself) is at address 0.0.0.0. The DNS correctly identifies other IPs on my LANs too. Next, I want to get samba to run right so that all the nifty Dos, Windows, Win95, WinNT software that resides on other machines can be brought to bear on editing and filing and other things. It is much easier to use the Brief programmer's editor, than to use vi. Go with what you know, and learn what you don't know (if you've got the time). I've used microEmacs in 1984-5 on Atari 520st computers, but I never got it to go as well as Brief on my MS-Dos PC. AFTER I've got DNS and samba running right, then I'll start reading my NFS & Nis book to find out why some error messages from them come up during booting of the system. If I was you, I'd do the installing the way that I have--from a CD-Rom. The FreeBSD 2-CD set cost me about CDN$35.95 at a discount store. The only other way might be to download the several hundred megabytes to a Dos partition and do the install from there to another hard disk or disk partition. I saw a news article or FreeBSD FAQ or FreeBSD Handbook html page on how to do this, but you might have to refer to this while undertaking the task, so I'd have it printed out and in-hand while going at it. With only 600 Mbytes, I think that you'll run short on space. They say the full install takes 700 Mbytes. I don't know how much free space you'll have if you had 700 Mbytes free to start with, but I know that you'll have to come up with very close estimates for the sizes of the labeled portions of your partition so that the install does not run out of space while it's unpacking and copying stuff to your disk like I did when I did it on my first couple of tries. Since I also posted this article and mailed it, I'll say "thanks for reading everybody." Hope that I am or get pointed in the right directions soon! Regards, Chris K. Skinner.