Date: Tue, 13 Jun 1995 00:32:05 -0700 From: gmo@microunity.com (Guillermo A. Loyola) To: bugs@FreeBSD.org Subject: Tape install & documentation Message-ID: <199506130732.AAA21266@bilbo.microunity.com>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hi BSDers, It would seem that there is a problem with tape installs or at least a documentation bug. The INSTALL document says to create a tape for installation by issuing a tar command like: "tar cvf /dev/... ". I did that on our freshly installed 2.0.5R, writing to an HP DAT tape. That command creates a tape blocked at 10k. When the sysinstall program tries to read the tape, it is using cpio -B which according to the man page means a blocksize of 5k. In fact when trying to use the tape to install, I get a message like "st0: 10k too big" (Sorry I didn't write down the exact wording) immediately. On a different subject, my previous attempt to install 2.0.5R on the machine I made the tape for was over an ISDN line with ethernet bridges (meaninig that as far as the machine is concerned it is just an ethernet that happens to only have 128kbits of bandwidth). I tried the install first using NFS with no special options and that just hung. Reading about the problems with NFS's big blocks I tried a second time setting the "slow ethernet" option and this time it didn't hang, but it was very slow (much less that 128kbits). Since my policy is "always blame NFS" I tried a third time using FTP and to my suprise, that was also about as slow. Now, this is a setup that I've been using with both Windows and FreeBSD 2.0R, and with either of them I do get transfer rates using FTP which are very close to the maximum (FTP reports 11 or 12 kbytes), but the 2.0.5R installation was just going like molases. Once I get 2.0.5 installed, I'll report on what kind of network performace I get out of the ISDN line, but in the mean time if you know of any reason why the install would go so slow, I'd like to know. For reference the machine in question is a Gateway2000 90Mhz Pentium with the Neptune PCI chipset. It has an ATI Mach64 video card and a Buslogic Bt946c SCSI controller with a Seagate 2G drive, Plexor 4X CD-ROM and the HP DAT tape. The machine has 32Meg of memory and uses a 3Com 3c509 ISA ethernet board. It also has a SoundScape board which is ignored by bsd. Btw, is anybody working on drivers for the soundscape? Do you know if Ensoniq is willing to disclose the necessary technical info? Gmo.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199506130732.AAA21266>