Ultrix on uVax I; booting using RIS and 4Mb

[Ian! D. Allen [CGL]]

In article <204 at orac.pgh.pa.us> pat at orac.pgh.pa.us (Pat Barron) writes:
>... One thing you can't do is load
>Ultrix 2.2 on to a MicroVAX I over the net (with ris), apparently because
>the ris in-memory kernel needs at least 5 megabytes of memory, and the
>maximum memory on a MicroVAX I is 4 megabytes.  You need to either start
>with a system already running Ultrix 1.2 (you can install Ultrix 2.2 over
>top of it), or else install the software on a MicroVAX II, and then move
>the disk to the MicroVAX I.

I use RIS to start Ultrix 2.0 and 3.0 on 4Mb VS2000's.  I think I even
did it on a 3Mb MVII/GPX.  I did cheat; all I used the in-memory kernel
for was to chpt and mkfs the file systems and then I ran an rsh to another
machine and did a network dump/restore to copy the other machine's file
systems onto the local ones.  Change the host name in /etc/rc.local,
boot, run /usr/lib/sendmail -bz, and presto the new machine is a clone
of the original.  Takes about 45 minutes to copy an rd53 machine.

I did find that I had to delete a bunch of stuff from the in-memory
kernel file system when it first booted to have a big enough /tmp to
support the network dump/restore.  But this way of getting a workstation
up is so much easier than a full RIS!  It's also the way I get Ultrix 3.0
to run on a single-rd32 machine when RIS thinks the disk is too small.
Use RIS to boot up your first machine, then simply use this trick to
clone machines from that master.
-- 
-IAN! (Ian! D. Allen) idallen at watcgl.uwaterloo.ca idallen at watcgl.waterloo.edu
 129.97.128.64    Computer Graphics Lab/University of Waterloo/Ontario/Canada