Date: Thu, 28 Dec 1995 10:29:50 -0800 From: Kevin McQuiggin <mcquiggi@sfu.ca> To: docs@freebsd.org Message-ID: <199512281830.KAA23334@ferrari.sfu.ca>
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Hi Jordan: You've done a great job on the install menus etc for 2.1. I do have some suggestions though: I had a few hours of confusion when trying to install via ftp from a Windows machine on my in-house LAN. I use WinQVT, which has an ftp server built in. My CDROM is on the E: drive on the windows box. The URL I supplied for ftp install was ftp://142.58.14.242/e:/dists, as that is the subdir on the CD ROM containing the bin directory, etc. First off, install didn't seem to like the "e:" in the URL. This should be passed to the host intact for parsing at the host machine. Secondly, the relationship of the options editor "Package" string (or whatever it's called, it has 2.1.0-RELEASE as a default value, and the target directory on the specified host, is not specified and very confusing. As the install failed, I finally (with the help of some guys on "questions") deduced that this variable must be appended to the path given in the URL to give the target directory on the host. Install must have been looking for: ftp://142.58.14.242/e:/dists/2.1.0-RELEASE is my assumption. I may be wrong. Am I? I'm noting that this should be documented for the user wanting to install from a CD on a dos or windows machine on the same net. I used anonymous login, and reconfigured WinQVT to have e:/dists as the root directory for anonymous login. Still no go. I would also suggest that for user-specified URLs, that the default path be set to the same tree structure on the CD, so that the /pub/FreeBSD/2.1.0-RELEASE directory lookup does not fail. Perhaps I should have set the options editor variable to "e:/dists" and left the URL as ftp://142.58.14.242? See what I mean? Some docs would be helpful. In any case, I ended up getting the base stuff from ftp.freebsd.org. This was initially unsuccessful as well, as I received msgs that "all specified distributions were not present on the server" listing bin, manpages, info, etc. I had restored all values in the options editor to defaults using WHAP! before this, of course. I found this very unusual as I was using the primary site. It wasn't a login problem, I logged in as ftp successfully. I finally used ftp://ftp.freebsd.org as a user-specified URL and succeeded in getting the base stuff that way. There was some confusion until I discovered that I had to include /pub/FreeBSD with the URL, however. Once I had the base stuff I manually retrieved all the distributions (source code, etc) that I needed by ftping to my Windows box, and finished it all up by hand. Here's a suggestion: It would be nice to have an option in the install whereupon the user could drop to the shell and do the ftping of dists manually, like the standard method used in 1.1. I realize that there's a shell on VTY4, but I could not find ftp (it's not in /stand and ls doesn't work so I can't even tell where to look although ftp must be there somewhere...). Again, some docs on this shell would be helpful. Just some feedback, I hope it's useful... Kevin --- Kevin McQuiggin VE7ZD mcquiggi@sfu.ca
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