The first step in the installation of an SGI is that cluster support enters the following in the prom monitor of the SGI.
setenv DISKLESS 1 setenv OSLOADER athena-sgi53-YYZZ setenv SYSTEMPARTITION "bootp()installservername:" setenv VOLUME 0 setenv NETADDR 18.XX.XX.XX init
The YY ZZ is replaced with the values for each processor/graphics card
combination. At this point the machine will go out and contact a bootp
server and request the kernel specified by athena-sgi53-YYZZ.
The kernel is loaded by tftp and executed. The kernel notes that the machine is supposed to be booted as a diskless workstation (diskless 1) and then issues a bootparm request for the root, sbin and swap of the machine.
The machine will start to boot and execute /etc/init, which is a simple program, which is replacing the SGI one. This program then forks and execs a script to repartition the hard drive (/etc/mit/ini). The script does the math for how to arrange the layout and calls the SGI program /sbin/fx to do the work. It then mkfs the devices that will be the root and the AFS cache. The last two steps the script takes is to mount the root as /mnt and runs MAKEDEV to creat the devices.
Init takes over again and umounts /mnt, it now forks and execs /etc/mit/post which remounts the root as /root. It proceeds to set up the hostname, broadcast address, static route. It mounts /srvd.2 from the install server. This partition contains just enough IRIX to boot a machine into multi-user mode. We then configure the loopback address so we can try to mount the CDROM. We make an attempt to mount the CD. We then call /etc/mit/athenainstall.
Athenainstall sets up some variables we have previously stuffed on the root disk and calls /etc/mit/phase2/phase2.sh. Phase2.sh checks to see if there is a tar file on a CD ROM. If there is, it will use tar and unroll that as the OS. If is does not, it will use track to copy files from /srvd.2.
Once the track or tar is complete, phase2.sh initializes some files on the root drive, installs the bootblocks, and resets the prom variables. Then it copies the correct kernel into place and adjusts several symlinks.
Our hacked version of init will now call the real version of init and the machine will reboot.
Once rebooted it will start AFS and call /etc/init.d/bootstrap. The script or mkservbootstrap file will check to see if the machine was installed from CD and if so will skip to the end. If it was not installed with a CD it will attach the appropriate OS volume and track files off of that.
At this point The CD and AFS install are back together, and we track the
current version of athena software on to the machine. We set the real
hostname, we set the AFS cachesize and reboot. The install is now done.
Time for AFS 1:30 for CD 0:45, as per requirement
1.1.3 (finish in reasonable time, page
).