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- SOSS Installation Guide
- -----------------------
-
- Installing SOSS is a simple task which should only take a few minutes.
- Before you get started, make sure you have the following items in
- place:
-
- - A dedicated 80x86-based PC running DOS 3.3 or above (it
- _may_ work with an 8088 and/or older version of DOS, but
- in that event the performance will be quite lacking).
- - An Ethernet card supported by the Clarkson drivers package,
- such as:
- 3Com 501, 503, 505, 523; ARCNET; AT&T StarLAN series;
- BICC Isolan 4110; IBM token ring; NetBIOS; Novell NE1000,
- NE2000; Racal/Interlan NI5010, NI5210, NI6510, NI9210;
- SLIP8250; Tiara LANCARD/E; or Western Digital WD8003.
- - The Clarkson drivers package, as distributed in DRIVERS.ARC
- via anonymous ftp on sun.soe.clarkson.edu.
- - The SOSS distribution kit itself, along with ZOO to
- extract it.
- - An NFS client system connected to the PC on the same Ethernet.
- SOSS has been tested against NFS running on several flavors
- of Unix: SCO Unix 3.2.2, AIX (RS/6000) 3.1, SunOs. The
- client must be capable of using 1024-byte (or smaller) read/
- write operations.
- - If you want the best performance, you should install extended
- memory (2-4 Mb) on the SOSS server PC and get a disk-caching
- program such as PCKWIK. SOSS itself does not use extended
- memory.
-
-
- Configuration Parameters
- ------------------------
-
- To plan your installation, determine several configuration parameters:
-
- - Whether the PC is using thin- or thick-wire Ethernet;
- - The I/O address, DMA address, and hardware interrupt number
- of the Ethernet LAN card;
- - The 4-byte IP address you will use for the PC;
- - The subnet mask of your TCP/IP network (for a typical
- Class C network, you would use 255.255.255.0);
- - The directory trees you wish to make available for remote
- mounting.
- - Your timezone.
- - The size of read/write operations (usually 1024).
-
-
- Procedure
- ---------
-
- 1. Configure your Ethernet LAN card if you haven't already been using
- it with the Clarkson drivers. Make sure its interrupt vector,
- I/O base address, and DMA addresses don't conflict with other cards.
-
- 2. Unpack the SOSS installation kit. You've probably already done that
- in order to read this INSTALL file. Here's an example:
-
- C:\>mkdir \soss
- C:\>cd \soss
- C:\SOSS>zoo x// a:soss
-
- 3. Edit your CONFIG.SYS file to contain these two lines:
-
- FILES=15 (or greater)
- DEVICE=NETDEV
-
- 4. Configure the PC/IP driver, using CUSTOM.EXE and NETDEV.SYS found
- in the EXE subdirectory. Copy NETDEV.SYS to the root directory (or
- wherever you store your drivers) and run CUSTOM on this file:
-
- C:\>custom netdev.sys
-
- Go into the "Site Customizations" menu and set the Internet
- address, the number of subnet bits, the domain name server(s)
- and time server addresses. Note that the number of subnet bits
- you select is added to 8 (the minimum Class A network mask)
- to form the network mask, so this means you should specify a
- value of 16 to get a 24-bit Class C mask.
-
- Go into the hardware customization menu and set the interrupt
- vector number, DMA channel and address, and the I/O address.
- You should not need to set the hardware Ethernet addresses.
-
- Reboot the machine to load NETDEV into memory. (If the machine
- fails to boot, make sure your copy of NETDEV.SYS was downloaded in
- binary mode and is 599 bytes long. Don't laugh--this problem
- _has_ happened.)
-
- 6. Invoke the packet driver using the appropriate parameters. An
- example for the Racal/Interlan NI-5210 card, using hardware vector
- number 5, I/O address 300 and DMA address D000 is:
-
- C:\>ni5210 -n 0x7e 5 0x300 0xd000
-
- Note that SOSS uses software interrupt 7E. If it loads correctly,
- it should display the following after the copyright message:
-
- Packet driver loaded at segment xxxx
- TDR Ok
- Interrupt number 0x5 (5)
- I/O port 0x300 (768)
- Memory address 0xD000 (53248)
- My Ethernet address is xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
-
- 7. Load NetWare, if you are using it in conjunction with SOSS. A
- program called IPXPDI (from BYU) is provided with SOSS to allow you
- to do this. Run IPXPDI after the packet driver and before NET3 or
- NET4. NetWare-386 server versions 3.10 and 3.11 are compatible
- with SOSS off-the-shelf; you will probably have to ECONFIG the
- server to ignore 802.3 packets if you have an older version of
- NetWare.
- NOTE
- SOSS does _not_ at present run as an NLM (NetWare Loadable Module)
- on the same PC as the Novell server software; you have to have a
- separate PC. SOSS can thus provide NFS clients access to files on
- Novell servers, using a gateway approach, but at significantly
- lower performance than would an NLM.
-
- 8. Set up the EXPORT.US file. An example is provided in the EXE
- subdirectory; you can start with a file simply containing:
-
- C:\
-
- 9. Set the timezone environment variable to indicate how many hours
- past GMT your site is. For example:
-
- C:\>set TZ=EST5EDT
-
- 10. Making sure you're 'cd'-ed to the directory containing EXPORT.US,
- run SOSS. You should not need to use any command-line options.
-
- 11. On your client system, add the SOSS server PC's IP address to its
- host table, and give it a name (e.g., 'dosbox'). The procedures
- for doing this vary; check the documentation for your name daemon,
- if you're using it.
-
- 12. Make sure there is proper connectivity to the SOSS PC. On a
- typical Unix client system, you can try these commands:
-
- $ showmount -e dosbox
- $ ping dosbox
-
- If these don't work, check your installation. If you have another
- NFS server on the network, make sure the client system can talk
- to the other server before you begin to doubt the PC installation.
- You should then get PC/IP (from sun.soe.clarkson.edu), if you
- don't already have it, and use its debugging capabilities to find
- out why the interface isn't working. A brief debugging section is
- presented at the end of this guide.
-
- 13. Create an empty directory on your client system to use as a mount
- point (e.g., /usr/soss). From an appropriately privileged account,
- issue the mount command on your client system. Again, this varies
- from system to system, so check your documentation. For a System V
- Unix box, the following should work:
-
- # mount -f NFS,intr,rsize=1024,wsize=1024 dosbox:/c /usr/soss
-
- SOSS will work with read and write requests up to 1024 bytes.
- Many client systems assume up to 8192 bytes, so make sure you
- specify this parameter.
-
- 14. Test the installation by listing the top-level directory (/usr/soss)
- to make sure expected files are there and by creating and modifying
- new files.
-
- 15. Once you are satisfied with the installation, modify the AUTOEXEC.BAT
- file on your server to start up SOSS. Here is an example:
-
- ni5210 -n 0x7e 5 0x300 0xd000
- set tz=EST5EDT
- ipxpdi
- net3
- key-fake "login server/user" 13 "passwd" 13 "castoff all"
- setclock
- cd \soss\run
- soss
-
- The KEY-FAKE program is provided to allow you to create scripts to
- answer prompts for passwords and the like.
-
-
- Troubleshooting
- ---------------
-
- The most common symptom of a faulty installation is simply that the
- client system won't talk to the NFS server at all. Once you can mount
- the filesystems, SOSS will usually run correctly (aside from the
- limitations discussed in the manual pages). If you can't mount them,
- check the following things:
-
- - Run 'ping' on your client system, giving it the SOSS server
- address; make sure SOSS responds.
- - Shut down SOSS, and run PC/IP 'ping' on that PC, giving it
- your client system's address. If that doesn't work, try
- other IP addresses on your network. If it does, try
- logging into the client system using PC/IP 'tn'.
-
- If you can't do either of the above, you probably have a problem with
- the LAN card installation or the parameters you gave the Clarkson
- driver. Double-check that you set up NETDEV with the correct parameters,
- and check your LAN card's documentation to confirm the hardware
- parameters against those you used to run the Clarkson driver. Then
- get a copy of the PC/IP distribution kit from sun.soe.clarkson.edu or
- from your SOSS distributor and review its installation procedures. If
- the PC/IP utilities are not working, SOSS won't either.
-
- If you have connectivity, do the following:
-
- - Issue the 'showmount -e dosbox' command on your client
- system. You should get output similar to the following:
-
- export list for dosbox:
- /c everyone
- /h everyone
- /c/soss/src everyone
-
- - Make sure the mount command uses lower-case when naming
- the remote filesystem; Unix commands are case-sensitive.
- - Check the mount command's documentation. SunOs, for
- example, uses the '-t' option to specify the filesystem
- type, rather than '-f' given in the earlier example.
- - Make sure your client system is issuing read and write
- requests small enough to fit in the 1024-byte limit. If
- it expects smaller values, you might want to use the '-b'
- command line option to SOSS.
- - Check that SOSS is receiving I/O requests across the
- network by running it with the '-v' command line option.
- - Turn on SOSS' debugging flags with a command like
-
- C:\>set nfsdebug=all
-
- prior to running SOSS. This will provide you with quite
- a bit of trace information for every I/O request.
- - Using the debugging trace output as a guide, scan the
- source code (provided with the SOSS distribution) to see
- what the server is trying to do with your client requests.
- The file nfs.c contains the top-level dispatcher and
- request-handling routines. You can recompile SOSS with
- Microsoft C version 5.1; contact the authors for help in
- making source code changes.
-
- SOSS is designed for 24-hour unattended use, and should be able to run
- for days or weeks at a time. If you find problems with system crashes,
- please contact the maintainer (rbraun@spdcc.com) via e-mail so they can
- be corrected.
-