Big problems with snapshot/20000226, part 1
der Mouse
Hmm, where's part 2? :-)
> Towards the end of the tar for base.tgz, it starts kicking out errors
> of not being able to set the date and permissions on folders it is
> creating because / is full.
Sounds like the "tar loses when /tmp gets full" bug that got discussed
on some list or other (I can't recall which one) recently.
> I went out to the shell and tried to do the tar by hand, and got the
> same results. / is pretty full (like 98%). Here's the weird thing:
> I deleted /sysinst and df *still* says that / is about 98% full,
Welcome to crunched executables. Most (all?) executables on the
installation ramdisk are hardlinks to the same file, which looks at
argv[0] to determine which program it should act like. (This is done
because it turns out to save space bigtime.)
One idea: pick a small piece of disk somewhere you won't need until
after you get a minimal system unpacked. Make a filesystem there.
Copy everything off the miniroot to that filesystem. Boot from floppy,
but specify -a among the bootflags. Specify that disk partition when
prompted for root device. Then you should have more space available.
The aforementioned discussion also included comments that make me think
it might work to set TMPDIR in the environment, pointing to somewhere
with more space.
If you have enough RAM for it, you could also mount an mfs over
/tmp...if the installation kernel and ramdisk support mfs; I'm not sure
whether they do.
Fixing tar, of course, is the Right Thing, but that's not something
you're likely to do on the spot.
der Mouse
mo...@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Paul Hoffman
that the developers of 1.4.2 didn't think they were done yet. :-) On a
machine with lots of RAM, I'm not sure why / is so small during
installation. Or, maybe this is just a tar fix. Or maybe a sysinst fix to
ignore these errors in tar.
Bill Studenmund
> I was reporting this not personally needing it to be fixed, but to be sure
> that the developers of 1.4.2 didn't think they were done yet. :-)
Just a side note: if you're using that snapshot, you're working with
something much closer to what will be 1.5 rather than 1.4.2. 1.4.2 is 1.4
with refinements. -current has major overhauls. :-)
Take care,
Bill
Thor Lancelot Simon
> I made the floppies from the directory, booted, and started a clean install
> using the default partitioning and just the non-X sets, getting them with
> FTP. This is on a Pentium system with a 13 Gig hard drive. Towards the end
> set the date and permissions on folders it is creating because / is full.
> perfectly reasonable times on them, but after the base.tgz untarring, it
> says errors were encountered.
This is a totally silly bug related to the use of 'pax' instead of 'tar'
on the install floppies. As it extracts, pax writes out a list of file
times and permissions into a file in /tmp so it can apply them in one
pass at the end of the extraction. Unfortunately, this file doesn't fit
on the MFS's /tmp.
A trivial workaround, though one I am hesitant to apply to the source tree,
would be to have sysinst set the environment variable TMPDIR to "/mnt"
before calling pax.
Another, related bug is that if you try to extract the sets by hand,
from the floppy environment, you have to be quite careful because pax-as-tar
doesn't assume -p if you're running as root, as GNU tar does. So, you must
use 'tar xpzf ...' where with the old tar you could use 'tar xzf ...' to
get the permissions right.
--
Thor Lancelot Simon t...@rek.tjls.com
"And where do all these highways go, now that we are free?"
Greywolf
# Fixing tar, of course, is the Right Thing, but that's not something
# you're likely to do on the spot.
Actually, another fix -- until we get TMPDIR implemented, perhaps we
should:
- make the root filesystem
- mount the root filesystem (/mnt)
- move /tmp to /otmp
- ln -s /mnt/tmp /tmp
--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: We're so committed to it being free, we won't sell it to you
even if you ask!