Jules Bean writes: > Hi there again... > > Still no luck with my floppy drive. However, I yesterday installed my > transceivers, and started net-booting. > > All went well initially (I'm booting off redhat, I'm afraid - it's my > friend's machine) until the stage where it downloads the tftpboot.img. > I had deduced (by using tcpdump ;) that a sparc-2 is a sun4c, and was able > to name the file correctly. It would show progress on the console up to > the end (26a400, IIRC) and then hang. After a long time (5-10 min) it > would eventually say 'receive timedout' or something, and boot into Linux > (yay! The penguin!). However, it would then give hundreds of I/O errors > when trying to mount the RAM disk.
Well, I had a similar problem with my older Sun IPC and LX. I have tried both the net booting and the tape booting (as explained in the README on the redhat site). I got exactly the same behaviour as you describe. At first I thought it comes from my tftp server (it ia another SUN and strage enough, I find no command rarp so I just ignore the step relate to this). Therefore I have tried booting by tape. > I tcpdump'ed the period while it is waiting, and the SPARC is doing lots > of ACK commands, clearly waiting for something. Believing that redhat's > tftp was broken, I first updated it, and secondly copied across my debian > one, but these didn't fix it. > > Eventually, on a whim, I noticed that the tftpboot.img is a odd-number of > bytes long. I used dd to pad it with zeros to the nearest 4-byte > boundary, and tried again. It works! So this appears to be some > alignment issue with the SPARC's tftp code. Can you explain more what you are doing. I may try it too. > Could this same thing be the problem with the floppies? Are SS2's more > fussy about alignment? I have been able to boot into linux with the debian floppies on the sparc IPC. But I got into another problem: the keybord is repeating too fast (actually the delay before repeating is so short). This is vary annoying because it is quite hard to enter a passwd correctly to login. Furthermore the same problem occure under X and xset does not seem to have any effect on the keyboard repeat. I have tried to issue "xset r off" to turn of keyboard repeating but to no avail. I have post the problem to this news group but never get a solution. For this reason, I would like very much to install the redhat sparc linux to see if it works better. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- PHAM Dinh Tuan | e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Laboratoire de Modelisation et Calcul | Tel: +33 4 76 51 44 23 BP 53, 38041 Grenoble cedex (France) | Fax: +33 4 76 63 12 63 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
