Re: Sparc netinst
Hi Tennis,
Tennis Smith wrote:
Hi,
I'm trying to netinst to an ss20. I have a tftp server setup on a win2k PC
(funny huh?) and I'm trying to netboot with your latest sparc-mini.iso.
Unfortuntely, it doesn't seem that the OpenBoot values for this scenario are
very well documented. I looked in the Debian docs and none of the variants
on this worked for me.
I doubt you can netboot from an iso. An iso image file usually is the
image of a CD filesystem, which is supposed to be burned to a CDROM, and
ran from there. TFTP on the other hand requires images to be loaded to
be specially tagged for TFTP transfer over the network.
I did a netinst on my sparc station 5 last weekend (and on a hamilton
clone), and I went through some (in retrospective avoidable) trouble to
get my system to run so here's my advice:
First of all, make sure you read the file
http://auric.debian.org/~bcollins/disks-sparc/current/README.txt for a
lot of useful information. I assume the file you're looking for is
http://auric.debian.org/~bcollins/disks-sparc/current/sparc32/tftpboot.img
. Also Read the installation guide located here:
http://auric.debian.org/~bcollins/disks-sparc/current/doc/install.en.html
Install tcpdump or some equivalent software of your server. It will
prove useful when you debug boot failures. Install a RARP deamon.
Install a TFTP deamon.
When the sparc fires up, press STOP-A and type in boot net on the
OpenBoot prompt. The sparc will send out a request for an IP over the
ethernet connection, and when it gets one, it will ask for an image to
boot from.
First make sure you set up the rarp deamon on the server. All other
methods for address resolution (bootp, dhcp) didn't work that well for
me. RARP should work with any sparc box, I guess. And it's very easy to
setup: just add the hardware address of the sparc (displayed on bootup)
to /etc/ethers and give it a free ip from your local network. So if your
server is 192.168.1.1 you could give it 192.168.1.3 for example, if
noone else on your LAN is using the IP.
There is some inet.d killing and restarting magic involved in all this.
I ended up killing inet.d for good, and just running rarpd from the
command line in debug mode. Tcpdump showed a successful ARP request, so
that was done.
The next thing the sparc wanted was the kernel. In order to give it a
kernel, you need a configured TFTP deamon, and image directory, and an
image file. The image you've got already from Bill's server, the rest
you have to do yourself:
Make a directory to store tftp boot images in. I used /tftpboot. Then
configure the tftp deamon to look into that directory for files. You may
find the tftp deamon to be configured to look somewere else in your
inet.d configuration file. Do the inet.d reloading/restaring magic and
wave a dead chicken.
Looking at tcpdump, you should see the sparc sending TFTP requests for a
specific file, some hex values 'dot' SUN4M for example. Create a link
tftpboot.img to that file (or just copy it if you're on windows). If all
goes well, you should see a ton of output scrolling by on your tcpdump
window and the sparc should display a hex counter to show you that it's
loading the image.
You should be greeted by a friendly penguin framebuffer logo, and the
kernel loading messages scrolling by. Now, normally, you should see the
debian installer welcome screen and can go on installing.
If on the other hand the kernel hangs itself up in a loop requesting
something about SCSI, then make sure you reset the NVRAM to factory
settings. It should be STOP-N or STOP-D, I think, and then powercycle
the box. That bug took me a day trying to figure out. Thanks to the
friendly folks on #gentoo-sparc on freenode for their help, I could get
past that one ;)
Which brings me to another point: IRC. While you're installing the
sparc, and you have no real clue about sparcs, an IRC connection could
prove very helpful. I couldn't find a debian specific sparc channel
anywhere, so I'd recommend #gentoo-sparc for newbies. Although gentoo
doesn't have TFTP images, the friendly folks there seem to have done
more than a few TFTP based installations in their lives, and are of
great help.
So you've got your box to boot with the kernel from Ben, and a ready for
an install. Debian will ask you if you want to partition the disks.
Avoid one mistake I did: don't use a single partition for the whole / .
Make a small /boot partition of say 50M and you'll be fine. Otherwise,
SILO (the kernel loader) may not be able to load the kernel, and will
not be able to write itself to disk, *after* you've installed debian,
and you may have to re-install from scratch. The error message you get
from SILO in woody is not very helpful, but Mike Michlmayr helped me
interpret it properly. [1]
Finally, another mistake I made not worth repeating: I installed my box
with the images from woody, and after it finally installed (after a day
and a half of fighting with it), I went straight to unstable *without*
upgrading the kernel to 2.4.21 first. Bad, bad, bad, as a circular
dependency between kernel 2.4.21 and libc broke apt somehow. Spend
another half day cleaning my system, and removing packages to fix
dependencies. [2] I succeeded, though, and now the box is running
testing. and kernel 2.4.21. Lessons learned: *Avoid* the images from
woody of you don't plan to use woody, and use Bill's images to save you
the hassle.
And now, have some fun with the sparc,
dalibor topic,
a fresh-baked debian-sparc user.
[1] So, if you have a chance, do as I do: man the debian booth during
some Expo/Conference things (LinuxDays Luxembourg for me) and ask the
residing Debian developers/gods/long-time-users for help when you get
stuck during the installation. ;)
[2] dpkg didn't let me forcefully remove 'login', though. You should
have seen the looks on the faces of debian devs around me as I typed
that. I had a small audience behind me while I took the box apart with
dpkg to fix the breakage in apt resulting from the half-succesful update
to unstable. My first debian install, and I had people watching in
horror over my shoulders as I purged bits and pieces of libc, ssh, etc
off the box. Ah, that was fun!
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