Bitemelarry

Hardware

This machine is a Sun Microsystems Sun Fire v210. It bears serial number FM33910143. This model was end-of-lifed in June of 2006 [1]

Lights Out Management

Sun's, erm, Oracle's, docs on this machine's ALOM can be found at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19102-01/n440.srvr/819-2445-11/configure.html (as of this writing, anyway)

ALOM login credentials have not yet been re-set. This should be possible after Solaris is installed using setdefaults -a or something similar.

memory

OpenBoot firmware reports 1024Mibytes of RAM installed. 16Gbytes of RAM is the maximum supported configuration.[2]

Software

network boot

OpenBoot gets zeroth Ethernet NIC's IP address by RARP. Install rarpd and add an entry to /etc/ethers. This machine is at 00:03:ba:45:e8:c1.

After successfully getting its IP address by RARP, it then requests by TFTP a file which is a hexadecimal encoded version of its IP address. The needed file can be found on the Solaris 10 SPARC installation DVD at Solaris_10/Tools/Boot/platform/sun4u/inetboot. Copy this to a file with a meaningful name on your TFTP server and create a symlink that matches the hex-encoded IP address:

install -o root -g root -m 444 /media/cdrom0/Solaris_10/Tools/Boot/platform/sun4u/inetboot /var/local/tftp/inetboot.Solaris10_SPARC_sun4u
ln -s inetboot.Solaris10_SPARC_sun4u /var/local/tftp/AC100021

This machine should be able to get its network boot loader by TFTP now. If problems are encountered, check the following:

• Is there a RARP server running?
• Is the client machine listed in /etc/ethers?
• Is there a TFTP server running on the local subnet? (client system here broadcasts TFTP requests)

Now that the bootloader is running, it needs a bootparam server to talk to. This will tell it where to load the kernel from and where to find its root filesystem. apt-get install bootparamd and put something like the following in /etc/bootparams:

172.16.0.33     root=172.16.0.1:/srv/nfsroot/solaris_install/Solaris_10/Tools/Boot \
                install=172.16.0.1:/srv/nfsroot/solaris_install/Solaris_10 \
                rootopts=:rsize=8192 boottype=:in

And then realize that bootparamd doesn't cope with IP addresses in there. It does a gethostbyaddr for the client's IP address, so /etc/bootparams needs to look like

dhcp-pool-33.fnord.greeley.co.us root=172.16.0.1:/srv/nfsroot/solaris_install/Solaris_10/Tools/Boot \
 install=172.16.0.1:/srv/nfsroot/solaris_install/Solaris_10 \
 rootopts=:rsize=8192 boottype=:in

instead.

After the installer tries every available Ethernet interface, you may encounter a message similar to "bpgetfile unable to access network". I found that the machine with an IP address of 172.16.0.33 thinks that it is on a Class B network. Which makes a sad kind of sense -- there wasn't any DHCP done to figure out the netmask for that network segment.

Be sure to have the NFS mounts listed in bootparams available to the client system.