Looks like the problem got solved :))) 1. I had forgotten to activate portmap 2. The bsd.rd I had in "/var/tftpboot" wasn't btw also properly updated 3. Sometimes rarpd wasn't behaving and required a manual restart with "/etc/rc.d/rarpd restart" (maybe my old pentium3 laptop hw is getting older?) 4. The double interface (xl0 to serve netbooting and ath0 as gw) did not help with rarp routing; not to waste time with adding experimental routes to try, an "ifconfig ath0 down" did the trick
I have to add to Daniel (thx a lot 4 support dude!) that I have put all server config in rc.conf.local as I never change rc.conf; also, the basic hex link was enough to load ofwboot.net, without adding any SUN4U extension (maybe because this is a sun4v machine?). More, my exports works flawlessly with "/var/tftpboot -ro" without adding any client name: specifying them I got error 13 (permission denied) as (this took a while to discover) domain names were automatically appended; anyway, keeping in that dir only those 2 files I do not care about any other client accessing it (btw this is also an ad hoc netboot server so only active in a cross cable network). Still (this is a prayer for obsd devs) in case of simple netinstall (and of course not diskless setup) it would be great to have an enhanced ofwboot.netallowing direct tftp loading of bsd.rd to avoid all these hassles (this time it took me some hours to realize where the setup problems were). Now the next challenges are using openbsd as netboot server to install oraclevm and to install openbsd within its virtual machines. Did anybody already try this? Thanks Paolo
