Booting from server over network

[Russ Poffenberger]

I thought that maybe it was something just at my site, but it seems
somebody else has seen it too. Maybe somebody out there can shed some
light on this.

In a recent article, somebody wrote about how to install a CDC Wren V
drive.  In the story, they indicated that after configuring the disk, they
forgot to run installboot (hasn't everybody done this at least once?) so
the machine would not boot. No problem they said, boot as a client of
another machine.

Now the interesting part...

They said it took a long time just to load tftpboot and such and got a lot
of not responding messages. I have seen the same thing on my network.
Sometimes (not often anymore though) I needed to boot one of my servers as
a client of the other server so I could change the disks and controllers
and such. While trying to tftpboot, the spinning prompt literally CRAWLS
and takes upwards of 10-15 minutes to load boot. Then the same story for
loading vmunix. This was very frustrating. Once booted, it seems OK, no
NFS problems with other server or anything like that. I have noticed this
if the client is almost or more powerful a machine than the server. ie
booting a 3/260 from a 3/260 doesn't work well. Booting a 3/160, 3/50,
3/75 from a 3/260 works fine, although we have a couple of 3/60's that are
diskless that exhibit this problem, although to a lesser degree. Sometimes
aborting (L1-a) and re-booting will get things in sync and it will go
smoothly.

We are running a network of ~40 sun clients from 2 3/260 servers under 4.0.3.

Does anybody have any suggestions?


Here is a part of the article somebody posted that prompted my article...

>Once we got all of our files restored from the remote tape drive.  We
>tried to reboot.  Oops, we were supposed to run installboot.  Now our disk
>would not boot, and our tape drive was inoperative.  There is always
>another way.  We proceeded to install the Sun3 SunOS on a nearby Sun4, so
>that we could boot it in client mode.  After much frustration, we got it
>to work.  However, while booting from the Ethernet, it got caught in the
>Size: prompt where is says 'Size: #####|/-\####|/-\#####'.  When it got to
>the first spinning prompt, it slowed way down, and took a long time.
>Every now and then it would say something like the server was not
>responding, and then it would recover and we would see a flurry of network
>activity.  What made things worse, was that sometimes once it booted, it
>complained that it could not find its domain, and we had to reboot.


Thanks in advance,
Russ Poffenberger
Schlumberger Technologies
poffen at sj.ate.slb.com