installation without CDROM

[Joerg Wunsch]

As Steve Tremblett wrote:

> I understand how to mount an ISO image and share it via NFS or FTP,
> but the docs leave out one major step: how do I boot the machine
> INTO the installer to choose the media?

I think that has been discussed/described here in the list before.
You might want to search the archives for it.

In short (I hope I don't forget anything):

. your server machine needs to run rarpd because that's what the Sparc
  firmware is using; make sure you update /etc/ethers as well there

. your server machine needs to run tftpd, have boot/loader (for the
  sparc64 arch) in its tftpd dir, and there must be a link from that
  boot/loader file to a file named by the hexadecimal IP address of
  the system trying to boot; so for a target machine having the
  address 192.168.3.5, make a link to C0A80305

. you then need a DHCP server because that's what FreeBSD's loader
  uses, entries look like:

host yourhost {
        hardware ethernet 8:0:20:XX:XX:XX;
        fixed-address yourhost;
        option host-name "yourhost";
        always-reply-rfc1048 on;
        filename "kernel";
        option root-path "192.168.3.1:/cdrom";
}

  That's how it finds the installation CD-ROM image then.  Of course,
  the image might be mounted via an md(4) device.

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