Set up the TFTP-Daemon
 

First of all I turned on the SPARCstation to read out the MAC-adress of the ethernetcard (written on the top of the screen). Mark that it is displayed without leading zeroes. That is mine looked like this: 8:0:20:8:47:2b. When it was written down I had to set up RARP (Reverse Address Resolution Protocol) to figure out which ip-adress the SPARCstation would use.
To set the ip-adress I run the following command on my Linux server:

/sbin/rarp -s  192.168.0.50   08:00:20:08:47:2b
/sbin/arp -s 192.168.0.50   08:00:20:08:47:2b

Which one of the above commands you should use depends of the Linux version on the server.

TFTP (Trivial FTP) is used by the client to load the kernel over the network. To enable TFTP on the server you need to ensure that the tftp service is uncommented in your /etc/inetd.conf file. The line should look something like this:

tftp   dgram   udp     wait    root    /usr/etc/in.tftpd     in.tftpd -s /tftpboot

The argument following in.tftpd will specify the directory where it will look for the files that the client requests. After uncommenting it you will need to get your inetd process to reread the file:

kill -HUP <em/inetd-PID/>

Tips: type "ps -aux |more" to find out the PID of inetd. E.g. if it's 287 you type "kill -HUP 287" to restart it. Be aware of that if you have an older Linux distribution the tftp might have to bee patched to cope with Sun PROM tftp requests. Then I downloaded the RedHat Linux 5.2 kernel for the SPARC-processor and put it into the directory I specified for tftp. That is "/tftpboot".
(I got mine from Sunet, Sweden, or you could for the file 'tftboot.img' on a ftp-server near you.) When the SUN-box tries to load the kernel it will look for a file named by a standard convention. The name is the IP address of the sparc in hex with no dots, followed by the architecture of the client in all caps (e.g. "IPINHEX.SUN4C"). An example for my SPARCstation 1+ with IP 192.168.0.50 would be:

C0A80032.SUN4C

Therefore I made a symbolic link to the kernelfile like this (done a 'cd /tftpboot' first:

ln -s tftpboot.img C0A80032.SUN4C

After reading several "HOW-TO's" I assumed that I needed a root-directory for the client. That is I made a subdirectory

/tftpboot/192.168.0.50

because the client will look for a root-directory named for its IP-address, and copied the tftpboot.img into this directory. Though I've tested the net-boot without this directory and it seemed to work fine.
Then I had to share the TFTP directory. On the Linux server I out the following line in the /etc/exports:

/tftpboot sunbox(rw,insecure,no_root_squash)

where the clients name is sunbox.

 
 

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