I truly apologize for this.
This is a weird one. This is not a "feature" of our box, it was something I put in that exploits capabilities of the PROM (OpenFirmware) to allow floppy boot like processing at boot time.
You see, in development engineering, we used to have a special build kernels that allow booting off hard disk, but still going through the "floppy boot menu", and profiled kernels for performance analysis...
I, being extremely bored watching linking kernels, made it dynamically configurable... I was playing many games quickly when I hung out alone in a small perf lab.
It was not meant for field use... But obviously you guys are using it...
Let me check, and see if there is not yet an open RFE on this. I will submit one, asking for enable/disable of PROM environment variables from running system...
Ouch.
In one sense, I regret adding these features - since it is truly a break from the design of a simple box (the original design was that a floppy was required to access maintenance menu - I did an incomplete end run - but the remote console operation precludes floppy loading, so what is the real requirement here?)
No promises on a solution here...
Again, my apologies...
Luke Mewburn lukem@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au writes
"Jim McCoy" writes:
You really don't even need to boot floppy (search for the the
"floppy-boot?"
setting in the boot system) if you are in a hurry.
Do you know an easy way to unset floppy-boot? on a running machine, without halting back to `ok '?
There is no way to do this, and I agree with you that this is an unpleasant situation. On several occasions I have had to set a box to floppy boot (usually when an emergency forces me to run a 25/7 or prev_cp and I am somewhat distant from physical console access but can get to a console server over the net) and if I am using this hack to get the box running in the first place I am in no hurry to run it through another reboot just to turn off the floppy boot option, particularly if I am not sure the system will come up again if I do happen to reboot it...
jim