IRIX and Software

Just a thought - I've a spare Raspberry Pi hanging around here - How possible do you guys think it would be to turn it into a physical DINA box?

Why bother, I use an O2 to net-install.

Short answer is not possible. The DINA image is for i386 computers and the RPi uses an embedded ARM chip. To rebuild DINA's functionality using the same scripts and methods as deBug, you would need to get NetBSD running as the foundation. RPi support in NetBSD 6 is experimental and there is no support for the network interface, rendering it useless as a netboot server.

I have never used the Raspbian OS that they provide. It might be possible to rebuild the functionality of DINA using that as the base, but you would be building your own netboot server, not moving DINA to it.

Because I don't have an O2, my indigo2 isn't working, and the DINA image doesn't appear to work properly with Parallels, VMware Fusion, or VirtualBox on my Mac.

Any more silly questions?

Well, if you have only one SGI then the gain of using a network-based installer is marginal.

Not if you don't have a SCSI CD-ROM or tape drive to install from. Then it's pretty much a requirement.

You're spot on with this.

The Raspberry Pi won't run the DINA image, but all you'd need to do to simulate a DINA setup is configure DHCP/BOOTP, TFTP and NFS on the Pi. You'll get the same basic functionality, just not in the neatly-bundled DINA package.

That's more along the lines I was thinking of..

Digging further into my DINA issues, it looks as though the scripts didn't configure networking correctly when using vmware fusion on my Mac.

Looking at the ifconfig output there are two adapters present, local loopback, and wm0 - but the DINA script assumes the interface name is ifconfig_pcn0 in the script, which doesn't actually exist.

I've edited the /etc/rc.conf entry to match the interfaces available, and I no longer get the errors at startup when it tries to bring up the network interface, but I still can't communicate with DINA from anything else on the network, so I think I must have missed something somewhere..

Can you paste your ifconfig/route -a outputs for us?

Sorry for the potentially stupid question, but did you double-check the virtual interface settings in Fusion? Bridged/NAT/Host-only and the like.

Yup, it's set as NAT in Fusion, which works for everything else I've ever used, output as follows:

In this case NAT is the problem. NAT puts it on its own network inside Fusion, and just takes your mac's connection and routes the packets out that way. Physical machines on your physical network won't know how to reach DINA.

Try setting it to Bridged.

Yup, that's got it..

One to add to the Wiki methinks.. (changing the interface name & bridged mode)

Indeed, there are quite a few pages that could use clarification there. Glad to hear you got it fixed, good luck with the install!

Welcome to nekochan kcchris, and thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge!

Welcome kchris.

I realize this is a long thread, but I'm pretty sure there's a link somewhere in here to the NekoWiki page Using DINA For Network Installation Of IRIX . I think most of what's been discussed here is covered. There's even a link to a thread about running DINA under Hyper-V .

DINA's a godsend but it's quirky, even persnickety. It gets easily confused about what address it has assigned to a machine, sometimes requiring the user to edit some files before you can netboot again. I suspect that when I rebuild the NanoBSD build environment for my Soekris box, it'll be a reasonably quick job to update/migrate DINA onto a current release and clean up that sort of thing. No idea when I'll collect enough round tuits, though...

Is DINA still available ?
Can't seem to find it anywhere.

Thanks

Speaking of netbooting, has anyone managed to get an Altix 350 to netboot ? Seems like it should be possible but ... ?

You can't get to it at Harry's main site ? I was just able to bring it up.

I had to pull my server from one colo, haven't gotten it to the new one yet, and apparently missed a spot in swapping DNS over. Should be cleared up for the mirror at shiftleft.com as soon as any bogus entries are removed from your local DNS cache.

Ah, I'd just assumed the Swedish was telling me the file had disappeared long ago.
After some Google Translating, I have now logged in and downloaded it!

The world needs more MIPS Irix up to date software/code maintainers.
Everything seems to have ground to a halt around 2006-8.

Thanks