[alm at sirius.net.au]

> From owner-freebsd-sparc64 at freebsd.org Wed Jul 27 14:48:43 2005

> 
> Miles Nordin <carton at Ivy.NET> wrote, On 7/26/2005 4:00 AM:
> 
> > Is there a way to netboot FreeBSD/sparc64?
> 
> Alongside what Kris said, I also found this article helpful:
> 
> http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200301/sparc64-nfsroot.html

While that document (plus diskless(8), and the one on people.freebsd.org) where
helpful in getting started, I found that they didn't 
work quite as expected. I also didn't see why one has to boot off a working
FreeBSD install just to install a system. On OpenBSD, you only need a copy
of the installation media .. I think that's the same on NetBSD as well.

Anyway, on a Netra, here's my notes ... I'm pretty sure they're right.. 

-Get the miniinst FreeBSD ISO
        5.3-RELEASE-sparc64-miniinst.iso

-Mount the iso to /mnt via a loopback on the NFS/TFTP server
On Solaris:
lofiadm -a /export/home/alm/5.3-RELEASE-sparc64-miniinst.iso /dev/lofi/1
mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt

On Linux:
mount -o loop -t iso9660 \
        /tmp/freebsd/5.3-RELEASE-sparc64-miniinst.iso /mnt

-Put loader in /tftpboot directory
cp -R /mnt/boot/ /tftpboot

-Uncompress mfsroot
gunzip /tftpboot/boot/mfsroot

-Share out out ISO via NFS
share -o ro /mnt

-Configure a static DHCP lease for it:
host netboot {
        hardware ethernet <mac-addr> ; 
        option host-name "<hostname>" ; 
        fixed-address <IP addr.> ; 
        always-reply-rfc1048 on;
        filename "/boot/loader";
        next-server <TFTP/NFS server> ; 
        option root-path "<TFTP/NFS server>:/mnt" ; 
}

-Start dhcpd3 and tftp as needed

-On the Netra console (via a vt100 terminal), boot off the network

boot net:dhcp 

-And install as needed (EG: From FTP, NFS, etc etc).

One thing that I needed to do also, was to make sure I had my terminal
setup as vt100 .. sysinstall didn't like the default one I was using. 
So, play around with that if you're having issues with the actual 
installation .. 

Cheers,
	-Andrew.