Network booting Sparc / OBP machines

Been working with Johnny on getting the CentOS-5 Installer sorted to work on Sparc ( essentially any recent Sun hardware including the UltraSPARC T1 CoolThreads stuff ). However, the only Sparc machine that I have locally and is usable is an Ultra/10. Not the fastest machine on the planet, I know. Also, no one is allowed to crack jokes about it. So dont.

Anyway, getting network booting is easy for these machines, all you need is rarpd and tftpd installed on the machine. On a CentOS Machine here is how you would go about doing that :

yum install rarpd tftp-server
echo '{Mac Add of Machine} 192.168.1.45' > /etc/ethers
cp tftp64.img /tftpboot/C0A8012D
service rarpd start
{ edit the /etc/xinetd.d/tfp file and change disable=yes to disable=no }
service xinetd reload
{ on the SUN Machine, from OBP's 'ok' prompt type 'boot net' }

Couple of things to note here :

• You need the MAC Address of the machine to put into the /etc/ethers file along with the IP address you are going to allocate it. If you dont know what the MAC address is, start the machine up and look in the syslog on the machine running rarpd, you will notice a message like this :

  Feb 29 00:17:10 monk rarpd[18869]: RARP request from 08:00:20:f8:d4:c7 on eth0

  And you can get the MAC from there.

• If things dont work, edit the /etc/init.d/rarpd file and add a '-v' to the rarpd startup command line. Sometimes it helps to know what is going on.
• rarpd will, by default, check to make sure there is a tftp image that the machine can boot, however its worth telling rarpd where the tftpboot directory is, so add this to the end of the rarpd startup line in the initscript : -b /tftpboot
• The filename you copy the tftp64.img file to must be the Hex format of the IP address you allocate the machine via rarpd, and it needs to be in uppercase. For those who cant conver between decimal IP and Hex there are online calculators.

Now, time for me to get back to installing stuff and seeing what I can help Johnny fix.

- KB