devfsd problem

[George Mochrie]

On Monday 03 February 2003 5:00 am, Terry Chan wrote:
> George,
>
> The Gemini floppies started out as a 2 disk rescue/mini Lunar based distro.
>
> With the next version of Gemini, it will have devfs and devfsd installed
> already. That part works right now on my set of Gemini disks.  

Cool, devfs missing from the Gemini floppies was a bit of a hinderance.

> I've also
> installed rsync and I'm writing a network install program using Gemini,
> rsync and the Lunar iso (next iso will also have rsync installed).  The
> next Gemini also has limited ethernet support.

Even cooler :) When you say 'limited' ethernet support do you mean there will 
be a limited subset of drivers installed? Can we vote on the ones that _do_ 
get installed? <humour>I have 3 machines with on-board 'tlan' NICs, can I 
vote for it 3 times?</humour>

> But for your current problem, I think you need to check the symlinks in
> /etc/rcS.d/ and make sure you have a S10mount which points to
> /etc/init.d/mount.

Broken symlinks was one of the first things I checked for, the S10mount link 
is there and points to the right place.

> /etc/init.d/rcS runs all the scripts in /etc/rcS.d.  Mount should be run as
> part of running /etc/init.d/rcS, which would then start devfsd for you too.
>
> The changes to /etc/inittab are normally not necessary as devfsd would
> create the symlinks from oldnames (tty1, tty2, etc. to vc/1, vc/2, etc.).

I understand that, I just thought it would help with just this sort of problem 
if we used the devfs names. Is there any reason for _not_ using the new 
names?

> If you've copied the filesystems from an existing, working, Lunar box to
> these new boxes (low ram, no cdrom), then I don't really understand why you
> can't get your new boxes to boot correctly.  

Me neither :\

> Some more details on the
> problems you are having and what you are really trying to do would help us
> debug your problem.

The problem is that my devfs /dev is not getting mounted and devfsd is not 
running. All other problems spring from that. I can log in now that I have 
edited inittab to use the new names and have 'devfs=mount' passed to the 
kernel by lilo. There appears to be no reason why /dev is not getting 
mounted, it's in fstab, the S10mount symlink exists and I have support for it 
in my kernel. The machine I copied the installation from is a P200s and the 
target is a P233mmx, but I don't see that causing problems.

It may well be something simple I'm missing/silly I've done. It's probably not 
worth wasting brain cycles on, I have a habit of stretching my computers (and 
my knowledge) past it's limits. I expect few people will run into this 
problem and with a network install booting from a floppy and distcc it would 
be possible to get lunar running in a more conventional way. If I _do_ find 
out why it's not working I'll be sure to let you know.

Thanks for your help,
-- 
George Mochrie
aka Drasil
ICQ# 84423409