I spent part of yesterday and today upgrading majestic, my home DNS, DHCP, syslog loghost and boot server from NetBSD 1.6 to 2.0. majestic is a 1991 vintage SPARCstation 2 with 64M RAM and 2.5G disk and it’s served me well for the last four years (it orginally ran SunOS 4.1.4 and then NetBSD 1.5). It has no monitor (serial consoles rule) and sits happily in the corner providing key services for my network.

The upgrade didn’t start that well… In the past I’ve installed and upgraded majestic by booting from floppy and then doing an ftp install of NetBSD from one of my other machines. I wrote the disk1 and disk2 images to floppys and tried to boot from the disk1 floppy. No luck – got an error that there was no Sun disklabel on the floppy. Damn – must be the floppy I thought (I’ve had similar problems with bad floppys in the past). I then dug out some more floppys and started fdformatting them to see if they were OK. They weren’t – 80% of them must have been bad. Bah! After finding one that formatted without errors, I rewrote disk1 and tried booting from it. Same error.

I guessed that the floppy drive must have gone bad, so decided to try and hookup a CD-ROM and install from that (network booting would be too much of a hassle as majestic is the the boot server for my network and I’d have to setup another machine as a boot server to get majestic to boot from the network). I dug out my trusty Philips CDD-2600 external CD writer (6x read, 2x write!) and hooked it up. After a few hiccups with termination (plugging the cable into the top port of the 2600′s case caused errors, using the bottom one didn’t), I got the OpenBoot PROM’s probe-scsi to see it fine.

Now to get it to boot… Suns assume the CD-ROM is device 6, but mine was 4, so a simple boot cdrom wouldn’t have worked. I fiddled with various boot incantations and eventually got it to boot with the following:
boot /sbus/esp/sd@4,0:c
The section on Determining how to access your SCSI disk from the PROM in the sparc installation guide is very useful in this regard.

The rest of the upgrade went very smoothly, with only two minor hiccups:

  1. The user smssp didn’t get created. It’s only used by sendmail (which I don’t use), but pasted the following into my passwd file for completeness:

    smmsp:*:17:17::0:0:Sendmail Message Submission Program:/nonexistent:/sbin/nologin

    Similarly, the following in my group file:

    smmsp:*:17:

  2. My postfix configuration wasn’t completely updated. To fix this, I created /var/spool/postfix/hold and added the following to /etc/postfix/main.cf:

    proxymap unix - - n - - proxymap

I’ve already built a custom kernel and everything seems to be running smoothly so far. Another successful NetBSD upgrade complete (my third so far – the other two were much smoother, but this one only took long because of hardware issues). For those interested, here’s the dmesg output.