Booting a 3/50 from a 4/110 server?

[Huong Ton]

Hi net folks,

I am having problems booting a brand new diskless 3/50 from a 4/110 server
running 4.0.1.  I've tried SUN's 1-800 number, but haven't heard a
response in over a week!   Here are the hardwares and the symptoms:

Server:		4/110  8Mb RAM,   SunOS 4.0.1.
Client:		3/50   4Mb RAM,   SunOS 4.0 
No Yellow Pages running.

Symptoms:

The client was able to obtain its IP address from the server and download
the boot.sun3 from /tftboot.  It then tries to do a getfile request using
tftp to get the server name, its root and swap location from the sever via
the bootparamd deamon.  It's during this process that the client hangs
forever and repeatedly tries to obtain the information.   Running the
bootparamd on the server with the debug option I get this message
repeatedly.

bp_getclnent failed.
bp_getclnent failed.
  	.
	.
	.

I've tried removing the client and adding it back with no luck!  I have
checked the ether, hosts files and all the files in /tftpboot and they
seem to be OK.   Has anyone seen this and/or can share some wisdom to the
problem ?   Your help is GREATLY appreciated !

--Huong--

[[ I know this one, having been burned by it once myself!  Welcome to the
Internet, the land of nicknames and fully qualified names.  Too bad Sun
hasn't figured out what the difference is yet.  "bootparamd" calls
"gethostbyaddr" to translate the Internet address into a name.  It then
uses this name to look up the paramters in bootparams.  But
"gethostbyname" returns the *primary* name and not a nickname.  If you
have nicknames in /etc/bootparams then things will not work.  Just about
everywhere except Sun, it seems, the primary name is the fully qualified
domain name.  For example:  "titan.rice.edu" is the official name, but
"titan" is just a nickname.  This difference of opinion causes problems in
more places than just bootparams!  --wnl ]]