[Gllug] Sun Sparcstation - is it any use...?

[Nix]

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005, John Edwards stated:
> Other options are to plug in a floppy drive (I think PC ones work) or 
> boot over the network using DHCP/BOOTP, TFTP and NFS (the PROM command 
> is probably "boot net")

Indeed: the Netra T1 on which I'm typing this (an UltraSPARC *much* more
recent than those old Suns in the Sun room at Brunel[1] and with a
correspondingly newer OpenPROM) uses this to boot from its emergency
boot filesystem on another box, on the vanishingly rare occasions when I
need to do it:

boot net console=ttyS0 ip=192.168.14.14 nfsroot=192.168.14.16:/mirror/amaterasu

Large parts of OpenPROM syntax changed between OpenPROM 2.x and 3.x, but
I think `boot net' has the same syntax in both cases. (Specifying disk
devices *definitely* changed syntax, and the neurons which said what the
old syntax was have been recycled. docs.sun.com has the old and new
OpenPROM manuals available, though.)

I'm fairly sure that the `console=ttyS0' will be wrong for a Sun with a
non-serial console, but the ip= and nfsroot= are unchanged.

You need a rarpd and a tftpd running on some machine on the local
subnet, /etc/ethers on that machine needs to have the MAC->IP
address-or-hostname mapping for the machine that's booting, and you need
a kernel image in /tftp (I think that's what it's called: I hacked my
local copy to put things in /boot/images and can no longer remember
the canonical location for tftp stuff); the image needs to be named
after the IP address in hex, something like `C0A80E0E'.


It's all a bit of a tangle.

[1] I was so envious of those Suns it wasn't true... and now I treat
    having a much more powerful Sun in my loft as just an ordinary
    everyday sort of thing, with my primary emotion being annoyance
    at how noisy the damn thing is. How times change...

-- 
`I work in computers so, of course, I'm an expert on everything.'
                                                     --- Simon Rumble
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