Booting Sun Sparc Servers (opens in new tab)

Flashbacks to working on E6000s with a 1 hour boot time. I now realize I took for granted working on sparc hardware every time I see one of these posts. We had rooms full of old sunstations that we would randomly pick through to host an FTP or web server for a bespoke (Perl!) application. This stuff is better emulated these days, but if you have a chance to play with older hardware definitely do it

Lovely tutorial, bookmarking it.

08:00:20 would be the first few byte of the MAC address on a Sun-manufactured ethernet interface (like an HME). A Sparcstation LX or IPC might have an AMD LANCE ethernet chip with a different value...likewise, later machines had built-in Intel e1000s.

Also, Solaris can DHCP just fine, but OpenBoot, at least, didn't support it when those workstations were made. You had to have another machine on the local segment running in.rarpd, which would hand out an address to match your MAC, and then it would use tftp to pull a bootloader from another (possibly different) host; which would get your Sun up to the point where rpc.bootparamd (possibly on a third(!) server) would start the Jumpstart install process.

Love the code block styling - nothing beats some amber glow!