Re: Boot procedure on old SPARCs
On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 07:33:28PM +0100, Guenter Millahn wrote:
> Dear Linux'ers,
>
> I have some old diskless SPARCstations of 4c and 4m series (SLC, LC, LX).
> I want to re-animate them as Desktopsthem using Debian.
>
> The Boot/Rootserver is a Sun E450 running Solaris8. I want to set up
> a DHCP server for easier maintainance of my computers.
>
> And here are my questions:
> 1. Can anybody send me a pointer to document/URL where is explained
> the Old SPARCstation diskless boot sequence in detail (explanations
> here are also welcome ;-)
> 2. Is it enough to install the Solaris8 DHCP Server Software on the E450
> or do I need any of rarpd and tftpd?
> 3. Are the Bootproms of the old SPARCs able to generate bootp requests
> and to process bootp replies or is RARP/TFTP the only way to map MAC
> to IP address for these machines and boot 'em up?
All of this is explained in the Debian SPARC install docs. Basically the
net boot for sparcs involves initially sending a RARP request to get the
IP, then dowloading an image or kernel via tftp. The downloaded file can
be either a simple linux kernel image, in which case you will need to
also pass NFS root options (also explained in the install docs), or it
can be a tilo image (a kernel image and initrd image together).
The tftpboot images provided in the disks-sparc directory are tilo
images, and you can use them to install a diskless client (which will
create and configure the base system onto an NFS root partition).
Again, all of this is explained in detail in the install docs here:
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/disks-sparc/
There you will find all of the required images and docs to get you
going.
--
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/ Ben Collins -- ...on that fantastic voyage... -- Debian GNU/Linux \
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