Re: Apple IIGS Netboot Authentication

[Rusty <rdekema@gmail.com>]

On Jul 3, 5:21 pm, Steven Hirsch <snhir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> You got me stumped...  Before I straightened out the missing uams_randnum
> issue on newer Linux distros, I saw that exact error.  But, it was consistent
> across netboot and conventional sessions.

I managed to get this straightened out. What was happening was I would
get the "unknown system error" message in any case when the
authentication actually _did_ work. The problem was that I didn't have
any volumes (including the volume I intended to boot from) flagged as
ProDOS volumes in netatalk's AppleVolumes.default file. (I wasn't
aware of the existence of this flag.)

Once I flagged the volume as ProDOS, my ROM 01 GS was able to start
loading GS/OS from the network. However, it choked at some point in (I
haven't yet determined which file it was loading when this happened; I
hadn't recompiled netatalk with --enable-debug1 at the time) booting
GS/OS, dumping me to a blue screen asking me to insert the volume
A2BOOT (the name of the network share from which the machine was
booting).

A very old post on this group led me to believe that this error is a
ROM 01-only thing, and that there was no known workaround for it other
than to use a ROM 03 GS. So, I dug out my ROM 03 GS, and it got past
this point just fine.

Even the ROM 03 GS choked when it tried to load "Start" from the
System folder. Once it did that, I got a blue text screen message
saying that my startup configuration was not properly configured and
that I should (what else) contact my network administrator. On a
hunch, I overwrote the copy of "Start" that the GS/OS Installer
"Network Server Boot" script had installed on the file server with a
copy of "Start" from a working GS/OS 6.0.1 system disk, and once I did
that, the machine was able to successfully boot all the way up.

I suspect that the "Start" supplied by the network script asks the
AppleShare server what application should be started (The Finder,
ProDOS8/16, etc), and that netatalk either can't or I don't know how
to configure it to supply this information. Either way, all I wanted
to have automatically load was the Finder, and now that's working.

I would still be interested to know if it is possible to make this
work on a ROM 01 GS; I will mess around with it, see what debugging
output I get, and if I find anything, I'll post it.

I am also thinking I will document this entire process on a website so
perhaps it will be easier for anyone who might want to set this up in
the future (as rare as that may be).



> Did you grab Marsha Jackson's "troika" package to get the proper set of
> programs for network bootup?  You may simply have a known hostile version of
> the login app.

I've never heard of this package and was unable to find it from a
couple of cursory Google searches, but then I found out what was wrong
so I quit looking.


> BTW, are you finding that the file dates are not being preserved when moving
> things to the server?  This used to work properly, but with netatalk 2.0.3,
> it's broken.  I need to put a gun to my head and figure out what got munged.

I haven't noticed this, but I hadn't really looked either :).