Its Booting !!!!!
My cobbled together NeXT station is actually booting :) :) :) :) :) :) :)
non turbo colorstation board is working, and the 540M hard drive from the monostation still has NS on it. It had some warnings at boot, since the netinfo and remote mount points it was looking for were not found, but I am now at the login screen. Will have to do the root password reset, and see what is on it.
Another NeXT machine lives....
Chef
Ok, got into single user mode, started the services, and now it is hung on a "Mounting remote filesystems"
Any way to interrupt this process, or get it to skip this?
Chef
EDIT:
Tried ctrl-C, and it went to "Starting file service daemons:", but now it is stuck again and ctrl-c does not do anything. Is it possible to reset the password without all the services started? Which ones are the minimum necessary, and can I start them individually to get around this. Is there a mtab or fstab that I can edit to remove the remote mount points, and keep it from trying.
Quote from: "nextchef"Ok, got into single user mode, started the services, and now it is hung on a "Mounting remote filesystems"
Any way to interrupt this process, or get it to skip this?
Chef
EDIT:
Tried ctrl-C, and it went to "Starting file service daemons:", but now it is stuck again and ctrl-c does not do anything. Is it possible to reset the password without all the services started? Which ones are the minimum necessary, and can I start them individually to get around this. Is there a mtab or fstab that I can edit to remove the remote mount points, and keep it from trying.
I think there is fstab as I b0rked my slab recently when playing with it...
Ignored the instructions, and changed the password without starting the services. Machine is booting back up, and will see what happens.
Chef
EDIT: I guess some of the services are required, as it did not seem to reset the password. Will try again just to make sure.
Well, no luck yet. I tried to edit the /etc/passwd file directly, as I would on a sun machine to reset root to nothing, and it did not work. I guess netinfo or something recreates the file on each boot, as it returned it to the same it was before.
I checked the fstab and mtab files, but can not find any info on remote filesystems to comment out. Is this info stored somewhere else in the filesystem on NS.
Are there any other files I can modify in order to reset the passwd stored in netinfo?
So close .. yet so far......
Chef
Well, if you've got an external SCSI CD-ROM with the right cable, then re-installing the OS isn't really that hard.
I didn't have any hard drives with the OS on them, so I just installed fresh. Worked well for me...
Quote from: "Ashman"Well, if you've got an external SCSI CD-ROM with the right cable, then re-installing the OS isn't really that hard.
I didn't have any hard drives with the OS on them, so I just installed fresh. Worked well for me...
Yea, could always do that. But wanted to see what was on the system before trashing it. You never know what kind of fun things you can find on an old machine, kind of like being an archaeologist of sorts.
Chef
EDIT: I hooked it up to a hub, so at least it would get link activity, which speeds up the boot. It is still hanging at the point of mounting remote filesystems. I poked around in the rc script, but can not find where it is getting the list of remote filesystems to mount.
The faq I was using was missing one crucial step. You need to remount the roof fs rw in order to get the services to start correctly. Once I did that, I was able to reset the password and login as root.
Now to see what is on it.
Chef
So far this is what I have found.
OS is NextStep 3.3.
Some of the apps on it are listed below. I do not know how many of these come standard, and which are added.
OmniWeb 1.0, GatorFTP, Nexus 2.0.1alpha browser
Mouse-X and xfe frontend for NeXT
Abscissa 2.0.0
CRSolver, Morph, SciPlot, NXplot3d, NXspice, ODE viewer
SkyView
WriteNow
MonsterShelf, NewsBase, snoop, Pastry, LiftOff
That is a partial list of what is here. Will take a look more next week to see what else I can find on it.
Chef
hum, have a look at /etc/rc (there you can comment out a lot of startup-scripts -> mounting remote-fs)
Quote from: "heCKe"hum, have a look at /etc/rc (there you can comment out a lot of startup-scripts -> mounting remote-fs)
Explicitly re-mounting the fs rw allowed me to change the root password, so messing in startup scripts was not required in this case.
Chef
do you still have the delay where it's looking for a networked filesystem?
Quote from: "weps"do you still have the delay where it's looking for a networked filesystem?
No, not really now. In normal boot, I am able to press "c" and force it into "local" network mode, which I was not able to do when running rc in single user mode. I will work more on it monday, as I need to set it up to not rely on a remote netinfo server.
Chef
Quote from: "nextchef"Quote from: "weps"do you still have the delay where it's looking for a networked filesystem?
No, not really now. In normal boot, I am able to press "c" and force it into "local" network mode, which I was not able to do when running rc in single user mode. I will work more on it monday, as I need to set it up to not rely on a remote netinfo server.
Chef
EDIT - FOR SOME REASON, I AM UNABLE TO CORRECTLY POST THE COMMANDS TO HELP YOU
:?:
Quote from: "kenjay"Quote from: "nextchef"Quote from: "weps"do you still have the delay where it's looking for a networked filesystem?
No, not really now. In normal boot, I am able to press "c" and force it into "local" network mode, which I was not able to do when running rc in single user mode. I will work more on it monday, as I need to set it up to not rely on a remote netinfo server.
Chef
This will wipe out all of the netinfo and you can start from scratch.
Boot into single-user mode. To do this ...
Type: bsd -s [press enter]
When your in - type the followingl [press enter after each line]:
cd /etc ?rm -rf hostconfig netinfo ?cd /usr/template/client/etc ?cp -rp hostconfig netinfo /etc
reboot
Then power off the machine - wait a minute and power on again.?
Will this wipe the users and their local folders and apps?
Chef
No - it won't.
Hey - don't type those commands!
For some reason - they don't show up correctly in the message!!!
PM me and I will send you the right instructions.
Can I just edit the hostconfig and netinfo files directly, and change it as necessary for my network?
Chef
I would need to add a resolv.conf file for my nameservers as well? right?
Quote from: "nextchef"Can I just edit the hostconfig and netinfo files directly, and change it as necessary for my network?
Chef
Yes - I'm sure that you can - if you know how to do it.
Let me try this again:
FORGET IT - IT WON'T COME OUT CORRECTLY :x
Quote from: "kenjay"Quote from: "nextchef"Can I just edit the hostconfig and netinfo files directly, and change it as necessary for my network?
Chef
Yes - I'm sure that you can - if you know how to do it.
Let me try this again:
FORGET IT - IT WON'T COME OUT CORRECTLY :x
He He ... I get the general Idea of what you were trying to say. Kill the existing ones, and replace with the default templates.
Chef
Yes.
I realize that you may know how to do this once you are IN the operating system, but there are many other people out there who just got a NeXT and they are seeing the boot process stall because it's looking [seemingly forever] for it's network. There used to be [links] places on the web where you could direct people to look for this - but not anymore.
I cannot understand why typing these commands into the text box on this message board causes them to come out corrupted when they are posted to the forum!
Quote from: "kenjay"Yes.
I realize that you may know how to do this once you are IN the operating system, but there are many other people out there who just got a NeXT and they are seeing the boot process stall because it's looking [seemingly forever] for it's network. There used to be [links] places on the web where you could direct people to look for this - but not anymore.
I cannot understand why typing these commands into the text box on this message board causes them to come out corrupted when they are posted to the forum!
I have had the experience of setting up NS on one of my SS5's, so I still had the notes and pdf file that others sent me about networking.
Could the board software be interpreting it as bad html, and stripping out some of the characters?
Chef
Quote from: "kenjay"I cannot understand why typing these commands into the text box on this message board causes them to come out corrupted when they are posted to the forum!
I think the "code" button will help prevent the problem you're having. Type the code you want, highlight it then hit the code button. It should put your unaltered code in a box similar to a quote box.
Quote from: "68040"Quote from: "kenjay"I cannot understand why typing these commands into the text box on this message board causes them to come out corrupted when they are posted to the forum!
I think the "code" button will help prevent the problem you're having. Type the code you want, highlight it then hit the code button. It should put your unaltered code in a box similar to a quote box.
There you go .. 68040 to the rescue !!!!!!
Quote from: "68040"Quote from: "kenjay"I cannot understand why typing these commands into the text box on this message board causes them to come out corrupted when they are posted to the forum!
I think the "code" button will help prevent the problem you're having. Type the code you want, highlight it then hit the code button. It should put your unaltered code in a box similar to a quote box.
EDIT - the problem was that I was using Safari. Now I'm using Camino, it's OK.
Here it is ... [wipes all netinfo]:
Boot into single user mode [bsd -s] press return
[and press return after each of the following commands]
cd /etc
rm -rf hostconfig netinfo
cd /usr/template/client/etc
cp -rp hostconfig netinfo /etc
reboot
After it reboots ... power off - wait minute and power back on.