tftpboot.img
Hi there again...
Still no luck with my floppy drive. However, I yesterday installed my
transceivers, and started net-booting.
All went well initially (I'm booting off redhat, I'm afraid - it's my
friend's machine) until the stage where it downloads the tftpboot.img.
I had deduced (by using tcpdump ;) that a sparc-2 is a sun4c, and was able
to name the file correctly. It would show progress on the console up to
the end (26a400, IIRC) and then hang. After a long time (5-10 min) it
would eventually say 'receive timedout' or something, and boot into Linux
(yay! The penguin!). However, it would then give hundreds of I/O errors
when trying to mount the RAM disk.
I tcpdump'ed the period while it is waiting, and the SPARC is doing lots
of ACK commands, clearly waiting for something. Believing that redhat's
tftp was broken, I first updated it, and secondly copied across my debian
one, but these didn't fix it.
Eventually, on a whim, I noticed that the tftpboot.img is a odd-number of
bytes long. I used dd to pad it with zeros to the nearest 4-byte
boundary, and tried again. It works! So this appears to be some
alignment issue with the SPARC's tftp code.
Could this same thing be the problem with the floppies? Are SS2's more
fussy about alignment?
What packages should I file these bugs against? boot-floppies? Or is
there a SPARC special virtual package?
Jules
/----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------\
| Jelibean aka | jules@jellybean.co.uk | 6 Evelyn Rd |
| Jules aka | | Richmond, Surrey |
| Julian Bean | jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk | TW9 2TF *UK* |
+----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------+
| War doesn't demonstrate who's right... just who's left. |
| When privacy is outlawed... only the outlaws have privacy. |
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