I've written a guide on cloning disks on Sun Sparc using the Gentoo tftpboot image and udpcast. The guide was written with Gentoo Guide XML. It is a project derived from the tftpboot image generation script by Jason Weeve, a Gentoo developer. You can see the guide here: http://www.artistic.ca/dteed/tftpboot-udpcast/ I wrote it with the Guide XML with hopes that it would some day become contributed to Gentoo. I've written Jason and also the Sparc dev team and so far there is no movement on this and no response other than one from Jason to say "I'm busy". In the meantime, Gentoo has come out with the "Gentoo Name and Logo Usage Guidelines" which state I'm not permitted to use a web design that mimics the Gentoo design if it isn't official. Well, I'd like it to become official, but no one is acting on this! I thought if it was all prepared in Guide there would be little effort to make it official, but so far - zip for responses. I'll change my site to say it is unofficial, once someone responds to this. Ummm, I'm too busy to change it right now. Ya, that's it. Reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: N/A Actual Results: No responses to date. Expected Results: Acknowledgement of the contribution/feedback/criticism/suggestions and potentially rejection of the contribution.
Created attachment 48219 [details] XML Guide version of documentation - cloning Sun Sparc disks
Created attachment 48220 [details] HTML version of documentation - cloning Sun Sparc disks
Created attachment 48221 [details] Script linked from documentation - cloning Sun Sparc disks
This file is also linked from the documentation but is too large to attach within bugzilla: http://www.artistic.ca/dteed/tftpboot-udpcast/gentoo-sparc64-1.4_rc4-20041112.tftpboot
Created attachment 48223 [details] Package linked from documentation - cloning Sun Sparc disks
Gentoo's a volunteer-driven distribution. It is known that many developers have little time to give to extra projects or bugreports, that's exactly why Gentoo uses several projects for it's contents (such as the Gentoo Documentation Project for documentation). At this moment, even the Gentoo Documentation Team has quite a few bugs to resolve, but rest assured that this one will be taken in a timely fashion. However, since the document covers sparc hardware, it will need to be verified by someone known to sparc either way (I'm only x86-aware).
Hi, I'm not fond of adding binaries in CVS (such as the TFTP boot image). I haven't looked even beyond that yet, but is it necessary for the document? The make_tftpboot.sh script is fine, we have a location for that, but I'd rather see the document without the tftpboot-udpcast.tgz file if that's okay with you.
I agree that the tftpboot image isn't required. However, I included for a couple of reasons. One is that Jason Weeve included a sample image on his FTP site. Another reason to offer a sample tftpboot image is that the people who might find this useful could be running the Solaris OS where this build script would probably fail to work. So I guess it comes down to whether this is useful for Gentoo users or Sun Sparc users.
Even though Weeve has tftpboot images on his page (so do you :) they aren't linked from our documents; we try to keep all documents close together - all files linked within should either be added to CVS or officially available somewhere (mirrors, such as in experimental/sparc/tftpboot). SPARC-team, would it be possible to add the mentioned tftpboot image to the mirrors, or update those that are so they contain the tools mentioned in this guide? You can find the current edited version (minor updates, no cutting yet :) at http://dev.gentoo.org/~swift/sparc-disk-cloning-guide.html.
I'll try to look into this over the weekend (work and everything else permitting). It may be hard to do this on sparc64 as certain models cause us to have a very hard 5MB limit on the size of the netboot images. I'll post more once I've had a chance to look into it.
From a documentation perspective, this looks good. The only suggestion I would make is taking out references to reiserfs as we don't support it. Experiences vary from user to user, some folks have had flawless experiences, others have lost everything. From the technical side of this, I need to sit down and work with catalyst to see if it can build usable sparc netboot images. If it can, then that would be the preferred way to instruct people how to build the netboot image. Additionally, the current netboot image on the mirrors for sparc64 is pretty close to the largest size a Sun Blade 100 or 150 will successfully boot. Depending on the size of the binaries needed for this, it may cause problems for users with those systems, which would need to be additionally documented as well. I'll start working with the netboot images today and post more as I progress.
Kewl, thanks
Initial testing of netboot image creation with catalyst is producing an image with a very large size. Chances are we won't be able to have a catalyst built netboot image ready in time for 2005.0. Labrador, do you know how much the size of your netboot images increased with lzo and udpcast included?
On an Ultra 60 machine, I'm getting a tftpboot image of 6227072 bytes. Quickly comparing that with the standard tftpboot image, on Jason's Dev space, it is 4986370 bytes.
If I take out lzop and udpcast binaries and the libpthread library I get an image sized 6106467 bytes. Not much of a reduction. Busybox and the kernel are newer than the original script I started with from Jason, so perhaps that partly accounts for the larger size?
Hrm, not sure what caused your larger sizes. I made some new tftpboot images today using the CFLAGS -Os for most applications and it helped quite a bit in size. I was able to add in dropbear ssh, as well as use the most current busbox, e2fsprogs and raid-tools versions and stay close to the 5MB mark. I also switched to using udhcpc from busybox over dhcpcd for space savings. Note that I haven't sat down and worked the bugs out of catalyst yet though, this was all with my script.
Sooo... how's the guide?
Time out
To whom was the question "so how's the guide" addressed? I'm not aware of any action items for me.
Recall that part of the reason I proposed this guide is so that my web page, made with the guide xml, containing the Gentoo logo, can be taken down. I'm doing my part to try and transfer this resource into one owned by Gentoo rather than myself. Until that has happened, my web site is violating the Gentoo use of icon, etc. (I think).
Closing this bug as per Josh's request in gentoo-doc's ML.
Reopening.
Comment on attachment 48219 [details] XML Guide version of documentation - cloning Sun Sparc disks Any further word on this since it was reopened?
IMO, this would be better maintained if the sparc team took it under its wings and published it in their project space.
Reassigning to the Sparc team; this is definitely project-specific documentation that would be best placed on their /proj/ space.
Hi, Just to let you know the current relevance on this. I know Sun has jumpstart and such, but it seems people like this alternative. In August alone, there were 19 downloads of my now dated tftpboot image. If you type in "clone Sun sparc disk" in google, my site with the Gentoo guide is the #1 match. "clone Sun Sparc' is #2 match, and "copy disk Sun Sparc" is #4. I didn't do anything to raise this profile - people must be learning of it through the grapevine.
Donald, Sorry for the lack of response. Is this still current? I don't think we were really aware of the request, but Markus Ullmann (jokey@gentoo.org) has been poking around in old, open sparc bugs and stumbled upon this one. Please bring me up to date, and then we can discuss possibilities.
(In reply to comment #27) Hi guys, I've just checked on my web server stats. Since June 2007, there have been 39 downloads of the tftpboot image for using it ready made, and 60 visits to the website to at least read about what it is. That isn't high volume, but it does indicate some people find it interesting or possibly useful. I don't use Gentoo lately, so I have not been doing any work on this. I didn't really feel it had to be bundled into a Gentoo specific site until I read the notices about use of Gentoo icon and such. I figured I should not be hosting this. I really like the way guide XML styles the documentation for Gentoo, and this was an outcome of Gentoo project, so it seems natural to have the documentation in this format.
Sparc team: this has been dead for almost 5 years. Not still relevant? Nothing you need docs work on? (Does it even work on sparc64?) Kill it, pretty please? :)
The tftpboot solution was developed on sparc64. I don't know whether it works on newer processors like the T2 - the kernel used is now rather old. The gentoo sparc group clearly do not have the resources to look into this and maintain it, so yes, kill it. Just don't hassle me about the use of the Gentoo styled guide web page. There are a small handful of people who find this useful, just as there are still people using Ultra 1 machines.
this is over a decade old. if anyone might find a use for it, please write a page for wiki.gentoo.org, now that we don't do XML docs anymore. closing.
