Re: Net boot with tftp

1998-08-25 Thread Adam Haberlach
On Tue, Aug 25, 1998 at 12:28:04PM +0100, Jules Bean wrote:
 On Mon, 24 Aug 1998, Stephen J. Carpenter wrote:
 
  any help is apreciated 
  
 
 Pad the file tftpboot.img to a multiple of 4 bytes long (with dd, for
 example.  Search this mailing list for good approaches.

I have a bit of documentation on this at 
http://rocheworld.dyn.ml.org/debian-sparc/

On another note: does anyone know how to do swap over the net for a diskless 
workstation?
I've got a cute little 386 w/ 8 Megs of RAM that I have netbooting, but it 
blows up trying
to uncompress packages during the install...


Xsun -- Where is it?

1998-07-25 Thread Adam Haberlach

I can't seem to find (in package or source form) the Xserver for 
S/Linux...is it out there somewhere?

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Adam Haberlach
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NEAT!

1998-07-22 Thread Adam Haberlach

I noticed that someone on this list had a solution to the must wait 
for 
the netboot to timeout problem that included padding the size of the 
tftpboot.img out to a mod-4 size.  I did this, just for kicks, and my IPX 
no longer boots to a scrolling SCSI ERROR message.  It is in the middle 
of setup right now, and is about to finish bad-blocking a partition.
Looks like I'm in at least some semblence of business.

Once again: for people with problems regarding the esp driver, they may 
possibly be solved by padding the netboot image out a bit.

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Adam Haberlach
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Unidentified subject!

1998-07-20 Thread Adam Haberlach
On Mon, 20 Jul 1998, Stephen J. Carpenter wrote:

Why are boot floppies more convenient?  What are you planning to use 
this
thing for?  Presumably it'll be on a network.

Pretty big presumption.  At least in MY case, floppies would have 
been more convienent, since I didn't have any other machine on my 
network capable of serving RARP/tftp.  Now that I've upgraded one of my 
other machines, I can actually netboot my Sparc IPX.  Of course, there 
are OTHER problems at the moment...
I had planned to use the IPX as my main machine (terminal, minor 
compiling, etc) and use my old 386 as a diskless router, netbooting off 
of the Sparc...now I've ended up turning the 386 into a Pentium so I 
could get onto the net...

Anyhow, if it fails the floppy self-test, you've probably got a 
buggered
drive.  But there *do* seem to be problems with the boot-disks at the
moment.

I've had the same problem with floppies with my IPX.  The CPU card 
of my IPX fails self-test (but it aparently has for years, and has run 
RedHat for quite some time).  However, the bootdisks fail shortly after 
lilo start, with an error on block 50, no matter how many disks I try.
The netboot blows up due to an esp driver bug, which can aparently 
be worked around by compiling esp.o with gcc instead of egcs.  Anyone 
willing to help, and make us a new tftpboot.img?

Are there any good sources of sparc-specific debian documentation 
anywhere?  I can hardly find references to sparc hardware on the web 
pages, other then the fact that Kachina is supposed to be helping out.


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SCSI Problems on IPX

1998-07-13 Thread Adam Haberlach

I've managed to get my system to start a netboot from my i586 Linux 
box.  After quite a bit of downloading, the kernel attempts to boot, but 
once it unpacks the root filesystem, I get scrolling SCSI errors forever.  
I've heard (from some redhat [boo, hiss] newsgroups) that this is caused 
by a bug in the SCSI driver that occurs on some systems with kernels 
compiled with egcs.  Anyone out there have this problem, a fix, or a 
workaround?


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Debian floppies in DIST/hamm/hamm/disks-sparc on ftp.debian.org

1998-05-12 Thread Adam Haberlach
I'm having some problems using the bootdisks to install Linux on my 
Sparc/IPX.  I first attempted to set up the floppy set by using dd on a 
BeOS system to squirt the files onto the disks.  When I attempted to boot 
the rescue disk, SILO loaded as normal, but when I tried to continue, the 
kernel could not be found, and it reported a short-read error on block 50. 
 I figured that it was a problem caused by the flaky floppy drivers on 
BeOS.
I downloaded the image files to the Sparc machine (it is currently 
running 
a version of RedHad that I really don't like) and attempted to dd them onto 
the floppies from there, but had the same problem.

Is there something I am misusing in dd?  I usually use bs=18k to make 
the 
copy go faster, but I've tried it with the default blocksize as well. 
 Otherwise I would suspect that the installatio disks (at least the rescue 
one) on the site are corrupt.

Is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong?

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Adam Haberlach
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Really USE your computer!  http://www.distributed.net


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Looking for Media

1998-05-09 Thread Adam Haberlach

I am willing and ready to run a beta debian release on my Sparc IPX.  
All 
I need to know is where to go to get installation media.  I can make 
floppies (assuming that I can dd an image from BeOS or Linux and have it 
work on my Sparc), or burn a CD if I need to.

On another note--does anyone else have problems with their serial ports?

---
Adam Haberlach
http://www.testlab.orst.edu/~haberlaa
Really USE your computer!  http://www.distributed.net


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Hi there!

1998-05-08 Thread Adam Haberlach

I just joined this list.  I've been a debian user for about a year now 
on various intel systems, but my trusty 386 finally keeled over.  I have 
since purchased a SparcStation IPX from one of my coworkers.  It came with 
RedHat installed, which I have already learned to loathe.

I am interested in using/beta-testing Debian on my system, and 
possibly contributing to compiles and development.  I do QA work at Be, 
Inc., so I'm pretty knowledgable about different systems and have quite a 
bit of experience.

Any ideas where I can pick up a CD-image for a debian/SPARC Cd to 
reinstall my system?


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