[rescue] Netbooting an E280R

[Wes Will]

My cow - orker down the hall dropped in again.  He has a 450 running
Debian, and he wants to put Debian on the E280R next to it in the machine
room.  Apparently just cd-booting it runs you into some sort of memory trip
with SILO, so he decided to set the 420 up for tftp and net booting, with
the Debian image file served from there.  His information is that this will
get around the ramdisk error or whatever foolishness caused by the CD ROM
boot.

Anyway, long story, I got the ports opened up on the Debian box (the 450
with the boot image in the tftp dir), edited the ethers file and other
such, and the E280R now gets an address.  The last thing we see is a
"serving boot.img" but no traffic.  netstat shows nothing being sent.  No
packets outgoing.  No packets incoming.  It just sits there, nothing going on.

Since Debian shuts down almost everything by default, I opened the tftpd
and rarpd ports via a change in the iptables filter rules.  Netstat shows
bootps and tftp, plus the usual cruft.  rarpd and tftpd are in the running
processes list, and the IP address gets assigned.  (Had to make a change,
my coutnerpart didn't use colons in the ethers file at first, we tweaked
that and got the IP assigned immediately thereafter.)

Any ideas about what I missed?  Some port on the tftpd side need to be
opened?  Why won't the boot image go out/come in and get this beast off the
ground?

--
wes will