[geeks] Can I netboot a SPARCclassic from Win95 box?

[Arno Kletzander]

Hello, everybody.

Sorry for not introducing myself even a tiny bit when I broke my
initial lurking here for the first time some weeks ago. I'm 22 
years old, located in Southern Germany and an Electrical Engineering student
at the University of Erlangen.

Interests of mine cover nearly anything technical (typewriters, calculators,
computers, audio and video equipment, telecommunications yadda yadda); I
have an European C-Grade HAM license (2m/70cm @ 10W
EIRP) which wasn't yet used much due to lack of time and mental
energy.

My packratted computing stuff mainly consists of PC machines, but I
also have some Ataris, Apples (Mac IIsi, LC, Performa 5260, 
iMac(dead)), two C64 (old/new shell) and (just recently acquired) a
few assorted Suns (SPARCclassic, SS5/10/20, Ultra 1, SPARCserver 
1000). It's a hobby, so I don't even consider buying stuff, mainly
relying on dumpster diving and sidewalk trash finds for supply.

Those mentioned Suns prompted me to investigate a way to use them
without having to enter the mysteries of *n*x style computing; I 
stumbled across a branch-off of the SIGOpS project (Special Interest
Group Operating Systems) dealing with coding for SPARC based machines.
I mentally interconnected this with FreeDOS.

I know I'm on a way that holds dragons, flaming hoops and *n*x 
advocates for the unsuspecting traveller, but I intend to learn some
C programming (I've only been fooling around with various BASICs and
a bit of Java up to now) and then attack this task. To get off the 
ground in the first place, I need a developement and test setup.

My main general purpose computer is an original IBM 90MHz Pentium-I
machine running under Windows 95; I do not intend to change this 
setup and I'd like to use it as my coding/compiling platform for my project
as well, if at all possible. My testbed will be a Sun 4/15 SPARCclassic
equipped with 40 MB RAM.

In order to ease the coding/compiling/testing cycle, and to avoid 
using the darn noisy yet intact harddisk of the SPARCclassic, I'd 
need to have it boot my images off the developement machine via 
Ethernet. I've tried to set them up using the NetBSD 2.0.2 netboot bootstrap
image, but there's obviously stuff missing in Windows 
that is needed for successful netbooting of Suns. I've not found
any hints to this direction on the Internet because obviously 
anybody inclined to try netbooting a Sun up to now either had a
machine around that supports it, just shrugged and set one up, or
gave up.

What I've done up to now:
I created a static entry for the Sun in the ARP table of the PC, 
using the MAC the Sun displays at power up and a free IP address 
in my subnet range:
	arp -s 172.16.14.15 08-00-20-18-ca-f7
(my PC is 172.16.14.75 btw, its subnet mask is set to 255.255.255.0)

tftpd32, a freeware TFTP/DHCP/BOOTP/Syslog server, is set up and 
running on the PC, listening on Port 69 (which is its default setting).

The netboot bootstrap image is present in the tftp directory on the 
PC under the name the Sun should expect it to be, in my case
AC100E0F.SUN4M (IP addy in hex . architecture code for MicroSPARC).

The Ethernet cloud between the machines (10base-2, hub, 10base-T) 
is verified to be functional, the Sun detects sane packets generated
by the PC when I do watch-net.

When I do boot-net on the Sun, it activates its Ethernet interface 
(Link LED on the hub lights up), transmits packets (ARP/RARP requests,
according to certain descriptions of the boot process), and repeatedly
complains about "Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet". I suppose there
should be something like an RARP server running on the PC, which 
I've not been able to track down yet (I know there's one for 
Win2000/NT, but that doesn't help my case...).

Somebody suggested the Sun should be able to get its address when I 
ping it from the PC, but usual pinging doesn't make a difference. If
I initiate a continuous stream of pings from the PC (before/while) 
the Sun is trying to get its address, the error messages (don't/
stop to) appear, but the Sun simply sits there waiting. The tftp 
Server does not indicate receiving any requests from it.

When I stop pinging again, the same error messages (start/continue) 
to come, sometimes only after several minutes.

Has anybody here already done something like this and would like to 
share the experience? We can of course take it off-list as it's not strictly
on-topic, due to the problems being on the Win95 side, but 
I'm sure there's somebody around who might know something to point 
me in the right direction.

Many thanks in advance, yours sincerely

-- 
Arno Kletzander
Stud. Hilfskraft Informatik Sammlung Erlangen
www.iser.uni-erlangen.de

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