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

[Michael Parson]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 12:39:31PM +0200, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 11:21:09AM +0100, Arno Kletzander wrote:
>> Hello everybody!
>>
>> We already had this thread some months ago and it was declared that the
>> problem was the unavailability of a machine capable of answering RARP
>> requests on my network. 
>>
>> I couldn't find a server that would easily integrate into the environment
>> I'm used to.
>
> What exactly do you need? There are RARP deamons for Linux, BSD, Windows
> and obviously Solaris.
>
> To net boot you need more than an RARPD, you also need a bootparam deamon
> and a tftp deamon. This is just to get the bootloader loaded and then you
> need an NFS sever to load the real kernel.
>
> This does not have to be an X86 box, Linux runs on many platforms and
> BSD on many more. You might even be able to get something going on
> a Machintosh runing OS X. 

He's restarting an old thread he originally posted to back in June.  His
primary problem is that his primary computer is a 90Mhz Pentium running
Windows 95.

Arno: I don't know if you've got a CD rom or not in that machine, or if
a system of that vintage could boot off it if it did, but I would maybe
recommend one of the 'Live CD' distributions of Linux or *BSD, maybe
Knoppix Linux.  Boot off it, get it configured with enough stuff to
boot your Sun, then get an OS loaded on it.  Once you've got the local
OS running on your Sparc, you can reboot your Pentium system back into
Windows 95, no harm to the existing OS at all.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org