Debian on an HP 9000 A500

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billanddave is an HP9000 A500 server with the following hardware:

  • Two 750MHz PA8700 processors
  • 1Gbyte of ECC RAM
  • Two Tulip Ethernet cards
  • Two 146Gbyte SCSI hard drives (unknown hot-swap capabilities on these)
  • A "Guardian Service Processor" which provides network control of power and remote console access
  • Firmware smart enough to boot the machine from the network

Debian 5.0 (Lenny) Installation process

Why 5.0 and not a current release? The Debian release managers dropped PA-RISC as a supported architecture for 6.0. It wasn't up to par with the other architectures on the quality front.

  • Install a TFTP server that can be reached by broadcast from the A500
    • atftpd was used here
    • /etc/inetd.conf was tweaked to so that tftp connections are only accepted on the server's internal IP address. No need to feed files to the world.
  • Set up DHCP to point the A500's firmware at the TFTP server
    • Here's the stanza used in /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf for this machine:
host billanddave {
        filename "/var/lib/tftpboot/boot.img";
        fixed-address 172.16.0.70;
        hardware ethernet 00:30:6e:48:e5:b7;
        next-server 172.16.0.1;
        option host-name "billanddave";
}
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