On Tue, 30 Oct 2001, Chris Thompson wrote:
taob@risc.org (Brian Tao) writes:
So it is possible to install the Intel kernel (for the F840) on anAlpha system (the F740) and have it write the Intel bootblocks to disk? Is this officially supported? It sure would be nice to skip the interim floppy boot stage when swapping filer heads.
No, I think Todd is wrong here and Jay was right in saying that you need to create and use floppies. "download" will use /etc/boot/*-alpha if it's running on an alpha box and /etc/boot/*-x86 if it's running on an intel one.
Maybe by foul means you could fool it into copying the "wrong" files to the boot area, but this would be burning your boats in a big way. If the new head fails to work, you would no longer be able to retreat to the old one except by booting from floppy --- and if you're prepared to do that, what's the big deal about making new ones?
Our F740/5.3.6R2 -> F840/6.1.1R2 upgrade happened this past weekend and everything went smoothly. I did confirm that you can't "trick" the Netapp into loading the wrong bootblocks for a particular processor architecture. I tried renaming the files and symlinks and so on, but the filer would complain about "wrong format" when I tried to download the boot blocks. So the bad news is that you do have to boot off floppy. The good news is that the Netapp prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot. ;-)