Booting Installation on SunBlade

[Kent West <westk@nicanor.acu.edu>]

I'm new to the Sun world, but comfortable on i386 and mostly comfortable 
on Debian for that platform.

I just got a lab full of SunBlade 100s that I get to play with for a 
month or two before they go into production for college students. So of 
course you know I want to try Debian on one of them. So I went to the 
Debian home page and followed the links to download a Debian 
Installation CD and burned this image:

ftp.au.debian.org/pub/debian-cd/potato/sparc/binary-sparc-1_NONUS.iso

When I turn on the SunBlade, I press Stop-A to get to an OK> prompt. I 
insert the CD and then type "boot cdrom". On reboot I get an error of
"Wrong Magic Number on CD label" (or something similar; sorry I don't 
have the exact message at the moment).

I did some searching of the archives, and it seems that maybe booting 
from floppies/CDs doesn't work on the Sunblades. I tried to follow the 
tftpboot "howto" that Paul Heinlein wrote up 
(http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2001/debian-sparc-200108/msg00063.html), 
but when I typed "boot net" I just got a bunch of "RARP timed out" type 
errors. My linux box was on a different subnet; I wonder if the tftp 
protocol doesn't travel across or is blocked at our router?

So, two things:

1) Can anyone speak to whether that CD image mentioned above will or 
will not work on a SunBlade 100? Or perhaps I'm missing some operand to 
the "boot cdrom" statement, etc?

2) Can anyone help me out with the tftboot process? Here's what I did on 
my Debian i386 box:

	* apt-get install tftpd rarpd
	* created /etc/ethers and put the SunBlade's MAC address and
	desired IP address, as so:
		0:3:c4:7:34:a8	150.252.167.104
		(the MAC address is not correct; I don't have the
		actual address in front of me at the moment) and
	made sure the file was world readable
	* created /tftboot and made sure it was world-readable
	* copied into that directory the tftboot.img file from
	http://auric.debian.org/~bcollins/disks-sparc/current/sun4u/
	(I couldn't find the older 2.3.6 image Paul mentioned in his
	"howto"). Made sure it was "other" readable.
	* created a symlink to that tptboot.img file within the
	/tftpboot directory. I named it in upper case letters,
	converting each octect of the address in /etc/ethers to hex;
	the result was "96FCA768". I originally had "macs04.acu.edu"
	in /etc/ethers instead of the IP, but when I came to this step
	and realized that Paul said this number was the hex form of the
	Sunblade's IP address, I figured the two files had to tie
	together somehow, and that Paul was using reserved DHCP in his
	situation. Of course, this might be where my problem is :-(
	* ran "/etc/init.d/rarpd restart" and "etc/init.d/inetd restart"
	* fired up the SunBlade, Stop-A, boot net, timeout errors

Thanks for any assistance!

Kent

	


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