[nycbug-talk] Confusion around Grub, NetBSD 3.0, DAC960 control (all for Xen)

[Tillman Hodgson]

On Mon, May 15, 2006 at 03:39:30PM -0400, alex at pilosoft.com wrote:
> On Mon, 15 May 2006, Tillman Hodgson wrote:
<snip>
> Oh jebus. Get a ghetto dell P4/3ghz with an IDE drive for 500$, and it'll
> be far more power-efficient and an order of magnitude faster that the 
> above. Of course, less of a 'omg look at all the prehistoric hardware i 
> manage to keep running' factor.

It's a sentimental thing -- it was the part of the first mail system at
a provincial ISP I admin'ed back in '98. It's still vastly over-powered
for the usage I have planned for it, and I have the other one for
spares.

> > I have my initial NetBSD install setup and I went to install grub. I
> > should note that I switched from Linux to BSD back in the ays when lilo
> > was the bootloader for most Linux distributions ... I've never used grub
> > before. In any case, I don't think I did it right :-)
> why are you using grub instead of bsd bootloader?

http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/howto.html

See paragraph 2 under _http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/howto.html_.

> > Is there an easy way to recover from this? My thought was to boot from
> > the install disk, get a shell, and re-install the BSD bootloader
> > somehow, and try to recover from there.
> yes, that's what you do.
> 
> on freebsd, you use installboot to install bootloader. I don't know how it 
> is on netbsd.

That binary doesn't exist on any of my FreeBSD machines. I assume you
meant bsdlabel -B? Digging through the man pages, it looks like
installboot is for NetBSD (which is what I'll need).

I'll try that tonight, which will get me to a normal NetBSD 3.0 system.
Getting to a domain0 system is the next step -- the NetBSD Xen HOWTO is
missing a lot of details around the grub section.

-T


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