RE: Sparc netinst
Hi Dalibor,
Thanks! Your writeup is a _big_ help. I'm now up to installing the base
system over the network. The dialog box's default url is:
http://auric.debian.org/debian which is incorrect. What should it be?
TIA,
-Tennis
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Dalibor Topic [mailto:robilad@kaffe.org]
>Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 04:45
>To: Tennis Smith
>Cc: bcollins@debian.org; debian-sparc@lists.debian.org
>Subject: 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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