Booting diskless clients under SunOS 4.0.3

[Kerien Fitzpatrick]

This message covers problems that I ran into while trying to boot diskless
clients from a server running SunOS 4.0.3.  The problem occurs in two
areas: the initial rpc broadcast after downloading tftpboot (boot.sun3)
and after vmunix is loaded and the nfs filesystems are being mounted.

If you have any TI Explorers on the net and try and boot a diskless client
it is probable you will see the same problem that I experienced.  The
boot file makes it across via tftp, but when the broadcast occurs for the
rpc call a TI Explorer answered and sent back an icmp packet saying the
destination port was unreachable.  This aborted the boot and gave an error
message saying bad dialog with bootparam server.

The second problem occurred under 4.0.1 and occasionally under 4.0.3.
After vmunix was loaded another rpc broadcast went out and received bad
responses.  This would abort the boot sequence, but unlike the previous
problem - this boot would recycle and after a few attempts it would
succeed and the Sun would boot.

Sun support was very helpful and very fast.  What is needed to fix this
problem are replacement executables for boot.sun[2,3,4] and some .o files
[kernel fixes].    Bug numbers are #1018583, #1018791 and #1013639.

Once I installed those fixes, all clients booted without a problem.
Hopefully, this message may save someone the 1.5 days that I spent
tracking this down - I thought I had mangled the upgrade.


Kerien Fitzpatrick
Field Robotics Center
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
fitz at frc2.frc.ri.cmu.edu
(412)268-6564