Further Notes on Open Genera on Linux

The previous notes don't seem to work in all circumstances.

In particular, trying to enable a CHAOS networking port in .VLM configuration causes NFS to fail in the writing of the Site file. I have been unable to diagnose this as it appears the VLM stops trying to use NFS to access the file after starting a write, and then times out, not even showing any activity on tcpdump when a restart is attempted. It's possible the presence of a CHAOS interface causes it to expect NFILE or perhaps it decides to prefer FTP over TCP. In principle, it should be possible to invoke the debugger on the VLM to understand what is going on, but all the networking is very flexible and elaborate and I have no idea how to debug Genera at this point. On the Linux side, I can find nothing at all that shows an error or misconfiguration or anything at all once the problem starts.

After defining the site and saving an incremental world, adding a CHAOS interface seems OK, but I have been stumped trying to get it to talk to a MacIvory over CHAOS or even TCP; probably this is because I don't understand how to bridge the VLM traffic onto my LAN and to the MacIvory and the reverse.

On another machine, even after disabling the CHAOS interface and successfully defining the site, Show Directory on HOST seems to not prefer NFS.

Before defining the site, accessing HOST: throws an error that refers to MAC-FS; perhaps the distribution world image is somehow configured for MacIvory behavior?

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