sparc64 net install problems.

[Dara]

Hi, Anybody got any experience with net installing Freebsd/sparc64 on sun netra T1 105, i have successfully installed Solaris and Openbsd via net install but i am having some real problems with getting Freebsd to install..
I want to run Varnish on it thats why i need FreeBSD, otherwise i would have settled with OpenBSD..

Anybody know of any guides that actually work ?

/Daniel

[SirDice]

We might be able to help if you told us what problems you are having.
It doesn't boot? It can't find the ethernet interface? No ip address?
Can't find the harddrive?

[Oko]

Hi, Anybody got any experience with net installing Freebsd/sparc64 on sun netra T1 105, i have successfully installed Solaris and Openbsd via net install but i am having some real problems with getting Freebsd to install..
I want to run Varnish on it thats why i need FreeBSD, otherwise i would have settled with OpenBSD..

Anybody know of any guides that actually work ?

/Daniel

Sparc64 is Tier 2 architecture on FreeBSD which in plain English means it is not really supported and appropriate for production.
The only Tier 1 architectures for FreeBSD are i386,amd64,
and PC98. It is either Solaris or OpenBSD for you body.

[Djn]

If he wants to test it and makes it work, who are we to stop him?

[cajunman4life]

Exactly. Let's not chase away any hope of getting Sparc64 to a Tier 1 architecture by discouraging those who may want to test and/or improve it.

I have a few sparc machines that I'd love to help FreeBSD with, just haven't the time. I have run FreeBSD on sparc before, however, with no problems.

[Dara]

The machine is going to run a proxy for my private sajts so it dosent mater to me if its Tier 1 or 2 as long as the programs i want to run works.. Plus, i like trying new stuff and i haven't tried freebsd sparc64 yet so..
I did get it to boot once but it was allot of twiking to get bootp rarpd and tftp and nfs all to play nice with each other.. but it wouldn't be any fun if everything worked right out of the box..
The problem right now seems to be that even tough i get it to start from the nfs and i can see the hard drives from sysinstall it seems to install everything on the ramdrive or something, beacuse after installation and reboot there is nothing changed on the hard drives.. really weird. going to have to look in to this more throughly during the holidays.

/Daniel

[zogness]

Should I be able to telnet to my tftpd server on port 69? I'm following this bloke's page: http://www.freebsdwiki.net/index.php/Installing_FreeBSD_with_netboot but it is written for x86 pxe booting.

Perhaps I should use http://people.freebsd.org/~murray/sparc64/install.html which is for FreeBSD 5. In inetd.conf I have enabled:

tftp dgram udp wait root /usr/libexec/tftpd tftpd -l -s /tftpboot
bootps dgram udp wait root /usr/libexec/bootpd bootpd

In my dhcpd.conf and I have

allow bootp;
option domain-name "yoyo.yo";
option root-path "/usr/local/pxeboot"; # root-path for NFS
filename "loader";

but I'm not at all sure what file I should place in /tftpboot. Should it be the kernel or the binary that does bootstrapping, whatever it's called in sparc64.

In my /var/log/xferlog I see:

Oct 14 19:13:19 spork tftpd[12845]: 192.168.10.41: read request for //loader: success
Oct 14 19:13:24 spork tftpd[12847]: 192.168.10.41: read request for //loader: success
Oct 14 19:15:17 spork tftpd[12856]: recvfrom: Socket operation on non-socket
Oct 14 19:15:54 spork tftpd[12861]: ignoring unknown option -?
Oct 14 19:15:54 spork tftpd[12861]: recvfrom: Socket operation on non-socket
Oct 14 19:16:00 spork tftpd[12862]: ignoring unknown option -?
Oct 14 19:16:00 spork tftpd[12862]: recvfrom: Socket operation on non-socket
Oct 14 19:16:06 spork tftpd[12863]: ignoring unknown option -?
Oct 14 19:16:06 spork tftpd[12863]: recvfrom: Socket operation on non-socket

Any help would be good. Thanks.

[tingo]

I think you should follow Murrays article, it looks more like what I did some years ago (http://geekinfo.net/article.php?story=20041101004514224).
You need to load a loader (hint the filename is 'loader'), and this loader needs to be of the correct type; ie. it must support loading the kernel over nfs (or tftp) if that is what you have configured your setup for.