The Life of PhotoJim

NetBSD pkg_add problem

Small problem today. I installed NetBSD 3.1 on mooloolaba, my Sun Sparcstation 20, yesterday. I was trying to use pkg_add to add some binary packages that I like, such as irssi, bash, and screen. Alas, no luck. The ftp logins kept failing, even though I had properly assigned the variable PKG_PATH to the correct one.

It turns out that the problem was that this version of NetBSD is not doing anonymous logins properly, and that was causing the FTP logins to fail. Even manual logins would fail, requiring you to use the user and pass commands to log in. The solution: Create a ~/.netrc file containing:

default login anonymous password youremailaddress@spamsucks.org

Here are some pictures:

That is before the mods...

...and after. I took out the 4.3 GB SCSI-2 drive and installed a pair of 8.6 GB SCA SCSI-3 drives, which freed up the SCSI-2 connector so that I could finally connect the CD-ROM drive. (Sparcstations use proprietary CD-ROM drives - they are normal SCSI but the form factor is unique. They are quite short height-wise.) I also put in an Ultra-SCSI controller in a free SBUS slot (you can see it in the middle at the back). The SBUS card beside it is the HME "Happy Meal" Fast Ethernet controller; the built-in Ethernet is only 10BaseT and the HME is 100BaseTX. You can also see the topmost of the two Ross 180 MHz HyperSparc processors that I installed a few days ago. Underneath the HME NIC is the Low Cost Graphics cgsix framebuffer, which I am not currently using since mooloolaba runs headless.

For general interest, here are some pictures of my "tower of computers": hobart (PII web/email/file server; home of this blog) at left; on the pile, top to bottom: mooloolaba (Sparcstation 20), moora (UltraSparc 1/170E, home of one of the Metanetwork IRC servers; maroochydore, my VAXstation 4000/60, running OpenBSD 4.0; canberra, an ancient 486sx25 with 32 MB of RAM that is soon to be retired; and devonport, my firewall, a Pentium 133. The latter two machines and moora run Debian Linux.