Subj : Rants & Raves: FreeBSD v4.x To : Lawrence Garvin From : Tobias Ernst Date : Sat Apr 21 2001 03:35 am Hallo Lawrence! LG> I discovered early on in the day that ftp.freebsd.org is also There are mirror sites, but I see you have discovered this on your own below. :-) Using ftp is always a hassle, primarily because some of those FreeBSD mirrors (especially almost all of them that are fast enough to reach from my location) don't support passive ftp, while I am using a masquerading router and hence must use passive ftp ... I'm usually using ftp1.de.freebsd.org and it works quite well. LG> But... can't use a local FTP Server from the CDROM... seems the LG> boot floppies for the v4.0 system are hardcoded to look for LG> ~/4.0-RELEASE on the FTP server. I can't find that directory on LG> my CDROM. If you have any Unixish system as an FTP server, make /var/ftp (or anything else) the ftp root, then mkdir /var/ftp/4.0-RELEASE, and mount the CDROM on /var/ftp/4.0-RELEASE. Then if you supply ftp://yourhost/ as installation server it should work. If not, you must make the whole directory structure, i.E. create /var/ftp/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/4.0-RELEASE and mount the CDROM on *that* directory, but I don't think this is necessary. Make sure that your FTP server supports the Rockridge extension for CD-ROM's, because the installation CD contains long filenames. If you FTP server does not support rockrdige, installation will fail somewhere rather late in the second part when installing the packages. LG> ftp.freebsd.org are somewhat up and running, even though LG> ftp.freebsd.org isn't. But, guess what. NONE of 'em have the v4.2 LG> release linked as the current STABLE release. Guess what else... LG> NONE of 'em have a floppies directory... how the hell am I LG> supposed to build a v4.2 boot floppy if the only place the images LG> are held is on a dead FTP server? LG> So... I checked.. maybe I'm being impatient... but v4.2 was LG> released as STABLE over six months ago (Nov 2000)! Doesn't LG> anybody maintain their servers anymore? They are being maintained, but you were probably searching the wrong directory. To take ftp1.de.freebsd.org as an example (but the structure is the same on all other FreeBSD ftp mirrors), you can find the directory layout similar to the one of the CD's on /pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386, below that is a 4.2-RELEASE directory which contains what a 4.2 CD would contain. Including a floppies directory. What you probably were looking in was /pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-stable, but this symlink points to the SOURCE CODE, not the stuff you need for installation. And here it is OK that the symlink points to branches/4.0-stable, because the current release branch is named "4.0-stable" (or just "4-STABLE"), and all releases (4.1, 4.2, upcoming 4.3) are made from that branch, so this symlink always just points to the latest stable source. LG> a. where can I get boot floppy images for v4.2? See above. LG> b. are these boot floppy images going to be smart enough to LG> look for the proper directory on whichever FTP server I can LG> manage to get a response from? Well, the FTP server must have a directory called 4.2-RELEASE indeed. When you set up your own FTP server, you must make such a directory, but the official FreeBSD mirrors all have one. Using any FreeBSD installation floppies you can specify a path to the ftp server. I have not done an installatino from scratch for a long time, but IIRC it is just a matter of using the right path. i.e., try ftp://ftp1.de.freebsd.org ftp://ftp1.de.freebsd.org/pub " /FreeBSD " /FreeBSD/releases " /FreeBSD/releases/i386 One of those variants works for sure. LG> c. where exactly can I find a v4.2 release tree? See above. LG> Or... should I just switch to NetBSD? or some-flavor-of-Linux? NetBSD is typically harder to install than FreeBSD, so for the moment you'd might want to stay with FreeBSD. :-) Viele Gre, Tobias --- Msged/2 TE 06 (pre) * Origin: Unisched - The Universal Scheduler for your Fido Node! (2:2476/418) .