Is it even possible? Has it ever been done? Am I just attempting something that is much like tracking down the elusive sasquatch?
What am I talking about?
I'm talking about a successful ftp install of NetBSD. Has anybody ever managed to successfully install NetBSD from a remote ftp server?
I've been trying, actually, my 7300/200 has been trying, for the last three or four days to transfer the BSD installation sets from various BSD mirror sites without any success whatever. What really makes the whole process so damn frustrating is that you rarely ever get a transfer rate higher than one kilobyte per second. These transfer rates mean that files that are no more than a megabyte or two in size can literally take hours to get from point 'a' (the server) to point 'b' (your computer). And heaven forbid that the transfer should stall and timeout; you're gonna have to start all over again. Simple question: With a process that is so painstakingly so and susceptible to timing out, why couldn't the brilliant minds behind these open source operating systems include a way to resume transfers, rather than having to begin the entire transfer all over again?
Man, I don't know how many times I've had a file transfer 90%, or even 99%, of its data from the server to my machine, only to timeout before receiving that last couple of kilobytes. This nonsense makes we want to pick up my 7300/200 and repeatedly slam it to the ground while screaming these words, "how's that for transfer rates, you piece of crap?"
I'm now making my final attempt at installing NetBSD via remote FTP. If this fails, my interest in installing NetBSD is officially dead. Hey, maybe I'll see you at the funeral. 
Are you using dialup? I've had luck with getting the install sets and hosting them on a local machine. Anything running OS X can do it just peachy. The suggestion thta someone made about going to Kinkos or some place and having a CD made isn't bad. There are also .torrents of the various .iso files if FTP is slow in general. If you have the .iso you can mount the file as a virtual drive under OS X and point to it in FTP as /Volumes/(cd name).
Nah, I'm using a three megabit cable broadband connection. I don't know if the problem is a crappy ftp client that is built into the NetBSD floppy installers, or if ftp sessions on these servers are just genuinely slow.
Actually, the slow speed I can accept. I don't mind waiting a day or two for the files to transfer at speeds between three kilobytes per second on the high end and between 200 and 500 bytes per second on the low end, but when I'm ten hours into a transfer of a measly 10 megabytes, and the connection times out, words can't express how frustrated I get. There's nothing quite so infuriating as spending hours downloading something only to have to start all over again.
Thanks for the tip on mounting a virtual CD, but, unfortunately, I'm not presently running OS X. I gotta get me a real CD burned.
The last time I installed NetBSD I didn't bother mirroring it locally, and I didn't have any problems. (Download was via a 384kb/s DSL connection. Hardware involved was a Sun Ultra 10.)
I've seen the NetBSD sites be "slow", but the download rates you're talking about are rediculous. There must be something with your local network or ISP that's screwing things up. Are you using a local NAT router (Linksys/Netgear/whatever) and giving your machine a natted RFC1918 address, or are you connecting it straight to the ISP? What sort of download speeds do you get if you try downloading the install files on another machine? If that goes fast then perhaps your Mac's ethernet hardware is screwed up. I can't remember offhandedly if there's an easy way to check the ethernet error rate inside the NetBSD install miniroot, but...
It's worth noting that if you have *any* other computer around that can run an FTP server and download files at a decent speed you can just mirror the .tgz files from macppc/binary/sets on *it* and eliminate the internet from the equation. If it's slow once you've done that I'd seriously investigate whether there's a problem with your Mac.
--Peace
Okay, I just booted up my faithful copy of Interarchy, selected "save as binary" and mirrored the folder at ftp.bsd.org/pub/netbsd/netbsd-2.0.2/macppc/ and it took about four minutes to totally mirror everything in the MacPPC folder on my hard drive.
So, it's not the server and it's not my connection that is causing the problem; my G3 sucked the entire directory in a couple of minutes. Either there's a problem with my 7300/200 or the installer floppies are buggy.
Anyway, can I just use a regular FTP server on a Mac OS 9 machine? I don't have anything else at the present, so I'll give it a try and see what happens.
Thanks,
Willy
There's definitely a problem with the 7300/200. I've setup an FTP server on my G3 and configured the 7300 to FTP to the G3. Everything works fine, albeit incredibly freakin' slow.
What could possibly be the problem?
Has anybody ever installed anything on a 7300?
I'm beginning to think that installing anything other than MacOS on Apple hardware is a total waste of time and energy.
EDIT: If I boot the 7300 in Mac OS, the ethernet port works just fine, and at good speeds. It's definitely something to do with NetBSD's floppy installer or something... What a waste of time!
If you care enough to follow through with it I'd suggest reporting the problem the the appropriate NetBSD mailing list. There may well be something awry in the current release.
Considering that NetBSD supports umpteen million different computers from one code base the possibility that something could of changed which broke a driver for your particular computer isn't that unreasonable. Keep in mind that it's a *Free* OS, whose Macintosh port is maintained by a few dozen dedicated volunteers who work on it in their spare time. What commercial support there is for NetBSD focuses on x86 and other current embedded platforms. The NetBSD people strive to make sure that their codebase is clean and portable, but face it, nobody gets paid to write an OS that works perfectly on ten year old scrapheap computers. The Mac port for the most part is a "labor of love" so you might cut the maintainers a little slack.
Frankly, it may be, depending on your point of view. Apple's hardware tends to be buggy, and Apple doesn't exactly go out of its way to document their hardware or its bugs in sufficient detail for third parties to write reliable operating systems for it. The fact that Linux or Net/OpenBSD run on it at all testifies to a *lot* of hard work, ingenuity, and downright sneakiness on the part of people who work on the platform. I'm sure they all do it just for the challenge. If challenges arn't your thing and all you want is a reliable low cost UNIX machine go buy a 440BX-based Pentium III computer for a few dollars and forget about anything exotic. Intel documents its hardware and its bugs copiously, since they don't have the financial incentive to discourage people from writing quality software for their hardware platform. Unlike Apple.
Anyway.
--Peace
And for a 440BX based P-II or P-III machine, I'd recommend a Dell OptiPlex. I've got a GX1 that went from a P-II 400 to a P-III 500 and can handle at least 768MB PC-100 RAM. I've also got a a GX110 that is a an i810 based Socket370 P-III 800 with 512MB PC-133 RAM. That sucker cost me $10. It'll run any modern distro just peachy keen. Sometimes you runs what you've got, as I have done in years past. Sometimes you upgrade 'cause it's cheap and better supported.