[rescue] Netboot SunOS 4?

[Dave McGuire]

On 2/24/22 12:58, William Barnett-Lewis wrote:
> The 411 w/cdrom I bought to set up my IPX arrived in far more pieces than
> I'd have believed possible.

   That's heartbreaking to hear.

> So, that leaves either another 411 or 611 box to put the salvaged cdrom
> drive in or to try netbooting to install 4.1.4 onto an internal 4 gb drive.
> 
> Thus far my google-fu is failing. Does anyone know a good description on
> the net for how to do this shy of waving a dead chicken over the computers
> involved. I could try doing this from my Sun Blade 2500 running Solaris 10
> or from WSL2 on my windows box.
> 
> Thoughts, ideas, suggestions?

   The first thing the ROM netboot code does is send out a rarp request, 
so you'll need rarpd running, with an appropriate entry in /etc/ethers 
to tie the client's MAC address to an IP address.

   The client will send a bootparams query to find out where its root 
filesystem and swap path are, so you'll need bootparamd running, with an 
appropriate entry in /etc/bootparams for the client.

   It will load its bootstrap code via tftp, so you'll need a tftp 
server.  The boot client will make a tftp request for a file whose name 
is the textual hexadecimal representation of its IP address, for 
example, for 192.168.0.100:

/tftpboot/C0A80064

     Depending on what architecture you're booting, it may want an 
architecture suffix on that filename, i.e. C0A80064.SUN4.  I don't 
remember which is which in this case.

   It is/was common to have the architecture-specific bootstrap file(s) 
in /tftpboot, and create symlinks to it/them for each filename under for 
it will be requested, for each netboot client.  Get the required boot 
file from /usr/kvm/stand/boot.<archname> in an expanded SunOS4 filesystem.

   Next, it will attempt to mount its root filesystem via NFS and load 
the kernel, so you'll need an NFS server with the filesystems 
appropriately exported.  Then, the rest of the boot process will "mount 
-a" everything else in /etc/fstab, typically via NFS.

   It has been a while; I'm pretty sure I got all that right.

           -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA