Intro NeXTstation Turbo Questions

From: R. Stricklin <red_at_bears.org>
Date: Mon Sep 14 00:08:44 1998

On Sun, 13 Sep 1998, Zane H. Healy wrote:

> Oh, in that case <zip, zing, whoose>, OK, it's booting :^) Had to hunt for
> a while for a place to plug the power cord into the monitor though I'm
> afriad. Then I realized there wasn't one :^)

Surprise! I always liked that.

> Well, it's now sitting in the "Mounting file systems" state, has been for a
> few minutes, don't know if it's fscking the drive, or looking for NFS
> volumes, for all I know it could be expecting some external volumes, but
> with a 1Gb HD I kind of doubt that.

Those are almost certainly NFS timeouts. It'll say 'checking the disk'
when it's fscking.

It's good news, though, that you didn't get the NetInfo timeouts as those
can indicate some of the most troublesome problems.

> OK, it's been about half an hour and the progress bar has sat at that point
> the whole time. Anyone have any ideas?

> Hmm, sounds like a plan, OK, I've just dropped into the monitor, and see
> that I've got 48Mb of RAM instead of 32 <yipee>, but only a 239Mb HD
> instead of a 1GB <sigh>. Gotta love an error msg of "WARNING: preposterous
> time in Real Time Clock".
>

> OK, playing some more with the ROM monitor, it looks like it's actually got
> some RAM that needs reset, or it's got a bad 32Mb SIMM, I know there are 4
> SIMMs, but it only shows 3, one 32Mb, and 2 8Mb (cool).

You might want to verify that; I seem to recall something about the
formatting of the display there that led me once to wonder the same thing,
but the machines require RAM installed in pairs.

Suddenly, though, that strikes me as odd, as my 040 cube uses 30 pin SIMMs
and takes the standard matched quads.

> Some more playing and I somehow got it to do a verbose boot (I was actually
> trying to power down :^/

Hit the power key. (:

The two most commonly used options to b are -s (single user boot) and -v
(verbose boot)

> OK, how do I boot single user so I can make changes to /etc/mtab? For all
> that goes does it use /etc/mtab? <hoping single user mode isn't password
> protected>

No, the console single-user boot is open. It is regularly used to repair
brain-damaged system reconfigs. (: I think there's an option somewhere to
password protect the single-user boot, but I've never heard of it being
done.

NeXT> bsd -s

will boot from the standard hard disk (first available SCSI disk) to
single-user.

Oh, and mtab is used by the OS to keep track of the currently mounted
fs'en. Edit /etc/fstab instead.

IF /usr/local IS NOT LISTED IN /etc/fstab:

The NFS Admin tool was used to create the mount entry and we'll have to
fossick about in the NetInfo db. No big deal, but it is desireable to
avoid doing so.

> Also, I'll try to figure it out after sending this, but how do I shutdown
> this thing properly? It's looking like a halt from the monitor, which will
> apparently sync the HD, and then pull the plug <gulp>.

Soft power. If the OS is running, hit the power key. It'll sync and power
off. If it's not (i.e. you're in the ROM monitor) just hit the power key.

Easy, eh? (:

> Also is there a FAQ on these systems somewhere? I took a look out on the
> net, but didn't dig anything up.

Look harder. It's out there, but is old and the maintainer can't be
reached---I had some additions but was unable to get them added. I don't
have the URL handy, otherwise I'd give it to you. If you truly can't find
it, I'll see if I can't dig it up.

ok
r.
Received on Mon Sep 14 1998 - 00:08:44 BST