FreeBSD on an Ultra2?

[Joerg Wunsch]

As Mykel wrote:

> Thing is - I know very little about netbooting, and I haven't been
> able to find much out in the first place. All I seem to find are
> Redhat things.

You need a RARP daemon (since this is what the Sun firmware uses to
find out about its own IP address), a DHCP server (that's what FreeBSD
uses to find about its boot parameters -- Solaris would use
rpc.bootparamd instead), and a TFTP server to supply the bootstrap.
Finally (and obviously), you need an NFS server supplying the
filesystem(s).

Configuring the RARP daemon is simple: setup /etc/ethers, and enable
it in your /etc/inetd.conf.  If you've got an ethernet interface with
more than one IP address, you might want to obtain FreeBSD's latest
version of rarpd.

Here's a snippet of dhcpd.conf (ISC DHCP) I've been using to netboot
one of my machines:

host HOSTNAME {
        hardware ethernet 08:00:20:XX:XX:XX;
        fixed-address HOSTNAME;
        option host-name "HOSTNAME";
        always-reply-rfc1048 on;
        filename "kernel";
        option root-path "SERVERIPADDRESS:/cdrom";
}

HOSTNAME is the intented name of your host (should be in DNS in order
to be used for `fixed-address', too).  Note the use of an IP address
for SERVERIPADDRESS -- this avoids the requirement of DNS lookups when
mounting the root FS.  In the above case, the boot server was serving
the image of the installation CD-ROM for a machine that was unwilling
to boot directly off that CD.  (You can read about it in the archives
of this list.)

The TFTP server must be the same machine that runs rarpd, and the boot
image must have the hexadecimal client's IP address as its name (using
the TFTP daemon's default directory, typically /tftpboot).  The actual
file to supply is /boot/loader (right from the CD-ROM in my case).
This is normally done using a symlink from /tftpboot/loader to
/tftpboot/C0A80301 (example: 192.168.3.1).

That's about all, type "boot net" then on your client.

> Once the OS is installed... does it still need to be netboot?

I think so, since the SCSI controller isn't supported at all (as
I understand the docs).

> PS: If anyone needs to have an E450 disposed of, feel free to ship it to 
> me ;)

I've got an E450 as my machine to play with FreeBSD/sparc64... but
even if I could give it away, shipping it overseas alone would
probably exceed the current value of that machine.  It's large and
heavy.

-- 
J"org Wunsch					       Unix support engineer
joerg_wunsch at interface-systems.de        http://www.interface-systems.de/~j/