[SunRescue] 'Getting started' questions

[Richard Close]

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Scott Newell [SMTP:newell at cei.net]
> Sent:	Thursday, March 16, 2000 2:36 PM
> To:	rescue at sunhelp.org
> Subject:	RE: [SunRescue] 'Getting started' questions
> 
> >1) For industry standard learning/playing you can probably still get
> Solaris
> >for the cost of the media +shipping.  It's what most Sun boxes run and it
> 
> I don't have a known-good scsi cd-rom.  Is it possible to do a network
> install from a Linux box?  
> 
	[>]  I have just installed Rehat 6.1 on my two sparc station 5's
over a network
	of Linux boxes with no problems.

	 You need a TFTP server for booting the installation program and an
NFS server
	to export the directory with the RedHat install files.

	 The first step is to boot the installation program, to do this you
must add an entry
	in the server's ARP cache and then set up the TFTP server.

	1) do the commands:
   rarp -s  sun_box     08:00:20:1f:cd:8e
   arp -s 192.168.1.100 08:00:20:1f:cd:8e

	replacing the name IP address and MAC address above with those for
your machine.

	2) Edit your /etc/inetd.conf file to enable tftp and set the
directory to that you will be using
	to serve TFTP requests, e.g.

   tftp  dgram  udp  wait  root  /usr/sbin/tcpd  in.tftpd  /usr/tftpboot

	In the tftp directory (e.g. /usr/tftpboot above) copy the tftp image
binary. For 32 bit machines like
	mine this is called tftpboot32.img and is the images directory of
the sparc distro. Next you need to
	make a symbolic link to actual file your Sun machine will try to
load from. The name of the symbolic
	is made up from the IP address and model number, but don't worry if
you get this bit wrong as the file
	it actually requesting can be found by looking in /var/log/messages.

	This extract from the UltraSparc FAQ explains it better than I can!

After this, you will have to create a symbolic link on the server which
points to the image the client will boot from. The name of the link contains
client-specific information, namely the IP-address in hexadecimal of the
client, and in some cases it's architecture. To create this link, you will
have to convert the four numbers between the dots of the decimal IP-address
to hexadecimal, and then put them together. If you have a machine handy with
BIND (the nameserver) installed, you probably also have a utility called
addr, which you can use for the conversion. 
Example of converting the IP-address 172.28.230.104: 
   172 = AC
    28 = 1C
   230 = E6
   104 = 68
or with the addr utility: 
   $ addr -p 172.28.230.104
   Input: "172.28.230.104"
   Network: [af2 len4] ac 1c e6 68
   Presentation: "172.28.230.104"
When put together, this will result into AC1CE668, what will be the name of
the symbolic link. If the client is not of the sun4u architecture, you will
have to add the systems' architecture name to the symbolic link, where our
example would look like AC1CE668.SUN4M for a SPARCstation 5 (sun4m). Next,
you will have to decide what file to point the symbolic link to. Most
distributions support two ways of booting from the network: 
*	Booting a kernel with an NFS-mounted root filesystem. 
*	Booting from a network-loaded ramdisk (mostly called tftpboot.img). 
To make the symbolic link for a sun4m machine: 
   ln -s tftpboot.img AC1CE668.SUN4M
which would create the symbolic link for an image that includes a ramdisk. 
  After this you need to boot your Sun using boot net, or boot net serial if
you are using the serial console.
  Follow the instructions for the install for your prefered method of
install. I used NFS you could also use FTP
but Redhat 6.1 does not offer the choice of SAMBA.
 For more info see the UltraSparc FAQ http://www.ultralinux.org/faq.html .
 Regards,
  Richard.


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