Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ginosko!husc6!rice!sun-spots-request From: white@cs.unc.edu (Brian T. White) Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun Subject: SPARCstation boot problem and solution Keywords: Miscellaneous Message-ID: <1731@brazos.Rice.edu> Date: 26 Sep 89 20:00:26 GMT Sender: root@rice.edu Organization: Sun-Spots Lines: 29 Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 139, message 8 of 11 We recently had problems booting sparcstations off a Sun-4/280, while Sun-4/110's running off the server booted with no problem. The message on the console was this: >b le(0,0,0) Got error packet: Error code 1 Message: File not found We tried all sorts of things to fix this, with no luck. Finally our local Sun Technical Rep, along with Brad Walker, from USA-4SUN, figured out what the problem was. We were missing a link in /tftpboot, and we needed to execute this: cd /tftpboot ln -s . tftpboot The reason the Sun-4/110 would boot while the SPARCstation would not is that the 4/110 PROM is set up to ask for a program called boot.sun4 via tftp. The in.tftpd on the server is set up (by the standard inetd.conf) to be invoked as "in.tftpd -s /tftpboot", which means that the 4/110 is really asking for /tftpboot/boot.sun4, which exists. However, the SPARCstation is asking for tftpboot/boot.sun4c, which, given the invocation of inetd, is really /tftpboot/tftpboot/boot.sun4c, which did not exist. The link above faked the existence of tftpboot/boot.sun4c within the /tftpboot directory, allowing loading of the boot program. We were disgusted that a lousy 1-byte link kept our SPARCstation down for a week. Hats off to the guys from Sun that figured this one out. I think we would enentually have figured out the problem by using a program that grabs tftp packets and reads the file name they are requesting, but it would have taken a while.