tftpboot.img
Jules Bean writes:
> 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.
Well, I had a similar problem with my older Sun IPC and LX. I have
tried both the net booting and the tape booting (as explained in the
README on the redhat site). I got exactly the same behaviour as you
describe. At first I thought it comes from my tftp server (it ia
another SUN and strage enough, I find no command rarp so I just ignore
the step relate to this). Therefore I have tried booting by tape.
> 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.
Can you explain more what you are doing. I may try it too.
> Could this same thing be the problem with the floppies? Are SS2's more
> fussy about alignment?
I have been able to boot into linux with the debian floppies on the
sparc IPC. But I got into another problem: the keybord is repeating
too fast (actually the delay before repeating is so short). This is
vary annoying because it is quite hard to enter a passwd correctly to
login. Furthermore the same problem occure under X and xset does not
seem to have any effect on the keyboard repeat. I have tried to issue
"xset r off" to turn of keyboard repeating but to no avail. I have
post the problem to this news group but never get a solution. For this
reason, I would like very much to install the redhat sparc linux to
see if it works better.
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PHAM Dinh Tuan | e-mail: Dinh-Tuan.Pham@imag.fr
Laboratoire de Modelisation et Calcul | Tel: +33 4 76 51 44 23
BP 53, 38041 Grenoble cedex (France) | Fax: +33 4 76 63 12 63
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