Hi all,

I've got an embedded PC that I am trying to get slackware 9.1 installed on. This PC does not have a CDROM or an Ethernet card. I am trying to do an installation using NFS as the source and using a local PPP connection between my embedded PC and my Redhat 9.2 box running the NFS server. This PPP connection would be through a serial port (ttyS1 in this case)

I've built the base.i, install.1, install.2, and network.dsk disks and am able to get to the root login and command prompt. I've run the netwrok script and had it probe for everything that looked PPPish using the "P" option:

ppp-general
ppp-deflate
ppp-async
ppp-asynctty
etc...

I did get a message that a ppp-async interface was found and the modules were loaded. I then tried to run the setup and selected NFS as my source, but no network connection was found. I'm sure I'm missing a few steps here to actually get the connection started, but I'm not sure what.

I have been able to set-up such a PPP connections between my two boxes in the past under Redhat 7.2. I had to use something allong the lines of this command on the embebbed box:

pppd lock -detach local persist 10.0.1.1:10.0.1.2 /dev/ttyS1 115200

and the following on the server:

pppd lock -detach local 10.0.1.2:10.0.1.1 /dev/ttyS0 115200

Unfortunately, it looks like the RAM disk does not contain pppd so typing this to set-up the connection fails.

Am I doing something wrong? Should I just pull pppd from my server and copy it to the ramdisk /bin directory via floppy? Can anyone offer some insight?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Sandy Pyke

I have to ask this....does your 'embedded PC' have a bog standard serial port?

Not sure what you mean by "bog" but yes, this computer uses a standard set of serial ports, at least for ports ttyS0 and ttyS1. The other ports require some special setserial settings to get working properly, but for now I am using just ttyS1.

I actually did end up getting this to work, here's what I had to do:

- Boot using bare.i, install.1, and install.2 disks.
- Install the ppp_generic, ppp_async, ppp_deflate, and ppp_synctty modules using the network.dsk
- Copied pppd and libpam.so.0 from my Redhat 9.2 system to the target system's RAM disk using a floppy.
- Created a /dev/ppp device using 'mkmod /dev/ppp c 108 0'
- Started pppd on the target using 'pppd -detach passive local 10.0.1.1:10.0.1.2 /dev/ttyS1 115200' (it complained when I tried to use the lock option, so I didn't use it...)
- Started pppd on the server using 'pppd lock -detach passive local 10.0.1.2:10.0.1.1 /dev/ttyS0 115200'
- Started the nfs server on the redhat machine

After this it looks like a standard NFS install, just very slow... At least it works!

Sandy Pyke