[geeks] Network-Booting Issues with a Sun Fire V120

[ADM Nerdsh]

Good morning people of this mailing list! :)

I’m very new to Solaris/SPARC machines and I like old computers. I recently got hold of a Sun Netra 120 to add to my collection. After discovering how to convert it into a Sun Fire V120 I wanted to install a copy of Solaris 10 on it to play around.
Since it has no cd/dvd drive installed in it I figured network booting might be the best way to honor its history.

Little did I know what journey that would lead me on.

I tried the rarp route as well as the dhcp route and I failed miserably so far.

To keep a long story short: I found the PROM firmware for my Netra120/FireV120 appeared to have a bug with rarp as well as dhcp netbooting, so I installed the PROM update.
Now I’m on the latest version I’m aware of that exists for this machine.
Still no luck.

Where I’m currently at:

Booting the DHCP-way gets me stuck here:

3a000 Using BOOTP/DHCP…
BOUND: IP address is: 192.168.13.50
Found 192.168.13.1 @ MAC-ADDRESS    <- This is my firewall on that subnet
BOOTP/DHCP configuration failed
panic - boot: Could not mount filesystem

A PCAP shows, that the isc-dhcp-server I have on that subnet does not appear to send the SUNW vendor options to the machine, even though it identifies itself as SUNW.UltraAX-i2. It is driving me nuts. I also tried dnsmasq but same results...

Booting the RARP-way gets me stuck here:
3a000 Using RARP/BOOTPARAMS…
Internet address is: 192.168.13.20

A PCAP shows, that it is sending NFS packets to 255.255.255.255… I have no clue why my debian VM hosting the nfs shares is not responding to that, but I have also no clue why bootparamd is not doing its magic in telling the V120 where to explicitly go?

Any help, clues or hints would be greatly appreciated.

I’m not posting this to the rescue mailing list because this is something I’m doing in my spare time, not a business thing. I hope this is the correct way?



I wish you all a pleasant morning

Audiocrush







-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: README.111991-07
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 5936 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://sunhelp.org/pipermail/geeks_sunhelp.org/attachments/20240326/3fa08fbe/attachment.obj>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 1843 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://sunhelp.org/pipermail/geeks_sunhelp.org/attachments/20240326/3fa08fbe/attachment.p7s>