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From: self@ics.uci.edu (John Self)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mips
Subject: installing RISC/os updates remotely from a non-MIPS machine
Message-ID: <27B1DBC6.2871@ics.uci.edu>
Date: 7 Feb 91 22:59:18 GMT
Organization: UC Irvine Department of ICS
Lines: 37
Nntp-Posting-Host: bugfix.ics.uci.edu

Does anyone have experience installing a MIPS RISC/os operating system
upgrade using a remote tape drive on a non-MIPS machine?  I don't a
tape drive on my Magnum 3000 and I'm wondering how many problems I
will run into when 4.52 becomes available.  So far I've had success
installing MIPS software packages by using tar to get them from a
remote system (a Sun SparcServer 4/330) which has a 150 Mb tape drive
attached.  I've then do the other steps from the install script by
hand (e.g. running comply.)  I think this will probably work for an OS
upgrade, but I wanted to see if anyone has tried this.   This brings
up a few questions

1.  If you've tried this were you successful?

2.  Do you have a better way to do this?  I don't want to buy a tape
    drive just to do installs because I have many Suns with tape
    drives, and my nightly backups are done on a remote Exabyte.

3.  My other concern is hard disk failure.  Without either a tape
    drive or another diskfull MIPS how could I reload the OS in the
    event of a serious disk failure?  If I could get bfsd running on a
    Sun I could do a remote tape install, but I don't have a source
    license.  The best thing I can think of is making a spare boot
    partition and root on my other disk, but I can't find any
    instructions on how to do this in my manuals.  Any advice?

					Thanks,
						John Self
						self@ics.uci.edu
						sdcsvax!ucivax!self
						JTSELF@UCI.BITNET



--

					Thanks,
						 John