Debian on an HP 9000 A500

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";
}

• • "next-server ..." tells it which TFTP server to use
  • "filename ..." tells it which file to get by TFTP
  • "fixed-address ..." gives it a more-or-less static IP address
• put the file from http://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-hppa/current/images/netboot/2.6/boot.img into the TFTP server's file store. I've renamed it to lenny-parisc-netinst.img