I'm picking up a used server machine. It is a Sun Microsystems Sun Fire T1000 with a Sparc 3 CPU running at 1 GHz with 8GB Ram and a 80GB HDD. This is a headless server, so I am going to have to use a serial console. I also have a FreeBSD 9.3 machine running a AMD Athlon T-Bird 1400MHz CPU that I want to configure as a PXE boot and install server. With this in mind, I have a few questions:
EDIT: The CPU is a UltraSPARC T1 Mutli-Core processor.
- What software do I need to get PXE up and running on the 9.3 machine?
- What image should I download for the Sparc machine?
- I've only used Sparc machines as a workstation user, never as an admin, and that was using actual Solaris. Is there anything that I should be aware of?
- From what I have seen, Sparc firmware seems to have significantly more intelligence than the i386 BIOS systems that I have been using. Is there anything that I need to configure, firmware wise, to get FreeBSD to work?
- I am quite familiar with the MBR and GPT partitioning schemes (I've been writing software for them.). What does Sun use? What is expected? It is similar to MBR? UEFI? Or something else?
- The machine doesn't even have the provision to connect a keyboard/mouse/monitor to it. It doesn't even have USB ports. So how to I use a serial console? What are the default settings that FreeBSD uses for the serial port?
- Related to #1 and #2, what is the procedure to setup a PXE boot server?
EDIT: The CPU is a UltraSPARC T1 Mutli-Core processor.