[rescue] Netbooting an E280R

[Mike F]

On Nov 21, 2005, at 1:14 PM, Wes Will wrote:

> My cow - orker down the hall dropped in again.  He has a 450 running
> Debian, and he wants to put Debian on the E280R next to it in the  
> machine
> room.  Apparently just cd-booting it runs you into some sort of  
> memory trip
> with SILO, so he decided to set the 420 up for tftp and net  
> booting, with
> the Debian image file served from there.  His information is that  
> this will
> get around the ramdisk error or whatever foolishness caused by the  
> CD ROM
> boot.
>
> Anyway, long story, I got the ports opened up on the Debian box  
> (the 450
> with the boot image in the tftp dir), edited the ethers file and other
> such, and the E280R now gets an address.  The last thing we see is a
> "serving boot.img" but no traffic.  netstat shows nothing being  
> sent.  No
> packets outgoing.  No packets incoming.  It just sits there,  
> nothing going on.
>
> Since Debian shuts down almost everything by default, I opened the  
> tftpd
> and rarpd ports via a change in the iptables filter rules.  Netstat  
> shows
> bootps and tftp, plus the usual cruft.  rarpd and tftpd are in the  
> running
> processes list, and the IP address gets assigned.  (Had to make a  
> change,
> my coutnerpart didn't use colons in the ethers file at first, we  
> tweaked
> that and got the IP assigned immediately thereafter.)
>
> Any ideas about what I missed?  Some port on the tftpd side need to be
> opened?  Why won't the boot image go out/come in and get this beast  
> off the
> ground?
>
> --
> wes will

/delurk

AFAIK the client will be looking to tftp an image named as the IP  
address of the client in hex, such as : C0A80113 or C0A80113.SUN4U  
where C0A80113 corresponds to 192.168.1.19 and SUN4U is the platform  
of the client. Create both of these as soft-links to boot.img and it  
should Just Work.

p.s. - there may be  some pauses, first when the client is rarping  
for its address and then when the client starts downloading the boot  
image

- Mike