Is it possible to run NeXTStep 3.3 over a network? I know you can install from a network. Is 10-Base-T just too slow for the OS? I thought it would at least be faster than MO drives.
I am tired of the whine of the drives in my 25 mhz Cube. I will probably try to the SCSI-IDE-CF project as well which would help.
Running things in a nice quiet VM is not as much as a cool looking Cube and Megapixel display.
It is possible to netboot a Cube. Check out the Network Administration manual here:
http://www.cilinder.be/docs/next/NeXTStep/3.3/nsa/13_NetBoot.htmld/index.htmlI do not think it is possible to netboot an M68K machine from an i386 machine however. The Netboot uses NFS to share the root partition, so the binaries need to be compatible with the machine being net booted. If the M68K Emulator project ever comes to fruition, this could be a good use for it.
I do not think a net-booted Cube would be much slower than one with an internal SCSI drive as long as the host computer wasn't being used for anything else. The bandwidth of Narrow SCSI was 5 MB/s which is less than the Ethernet port speed. So the most-likely bottleneck here is the disk speed of the host computer. Yes, I know the SCSI port is a Fast SCSI connector, but that standard was approved in 1994 and as far as I know the SCSI implementation on M68K NeXT still Narrow 5 MB/s SCSI-1.
On another note, the Cube had the option of an extra-long cable so that you could keep the cube in another room. This was necessary for audio recording, etc. Or you could get a headless-slab and keep it in another room as your network boot host.
I'm glad you're wrong on this. Since the fat binaries in a NS3.3 installation contain i386 & m68k binaries, I'm 99% sure you can netboot m68k from i386 and vice-versa. This won't work with 2.x and 1.x however. 3.0 probably won't either.
About a year ago, I had some time to kill and briefly tried network booting my slab from a Parallels VM running NS 3.3, using the instructions from the link above. Long story short, I wasn't able to boot a physical M68K NeXT Station from an i386 VM, and I gave up after a couple of hours of trying.
At the time I assumed that the binaries weren't M68K compatible. The question is, does the installer install a FAT kernel and BSD-executables, or only the files for the specific hardware. Considering the cost of HDD storage in 1992, I think it is likely it was hardware specific by default.
Looking back, another possible source of error might have been when applying the User Patch to the VM, because these are hardware specific.
Edit: The CISC user patch is M68K + i386. I might have selected i386 only when applying the patch.
I had configure my cube to netboot, however it loads the OS but shows the Build Disk application, but I would like to run NS
not sure how do I setup to run the OS and finder, instead of the Build disk
any ideas?
Thanks