[geeks] Netbooting a Sun IPC

[JP Hindin]

G'day;

I pulled out a pair of IPCs that I picked up years ago and thought I'd see
if they functioned. Lo, they both fire up nicely - one has 24M of RAM, the
other 16M with a cgthree in one of the sbus slots. I get beautiful crisp
video on both, and can pop into openboot without issue.

Alas, both have had their IDPROMs die, so on power on I get the MAC
address of ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff. I'd like to try and netboot them and chain
an install (possibly to local disk, possibly to an NFS mount, dunno yet)
but I'm having trouble getting them to talk to the network, presumably due
to the fried IDPROM.

When I attempt to 'boot net' I get:
Boot device: /sbus/le at 0,c00000 File and args:
Internal loopback test  Did not receive expected loopback packet.
Cant open boot device

I've set the 'diag-switch?' to false, which I thought would skip the
loopback test, but that doesn't seem to help. I've also followed the
instructions here (substituting the correct machine type of '52') to set a
MAC address:
http://www.squirrel.com/squirrel/sun-nvram-hostid.faq.html#GENERAL

Still, the same 'internal loopback test'. Unfortunately I only have a
passing famaliarity with Suns (to my shame), so I'm not quite sure what to
try next.

Could anyone offer any suggestions?

Thanks!
 - JP