SPARCstation boot problem and solution

[Brian T. White]

We recently had problems booting sparcstations off a Sun-4/280, while
Sun-4/110's running off the server booted with no problem.  The message on
the console was this:

>b le(0,0,0)
Got error packet:  Error code 1 Message: File not found

We tried all sorts of things to fix this, with no luck.  Finally our local
Sun Technical Rep, along with Brad Walker, from USA-4SUN, figured out what
the problem was.  We were missing a link in /tftpboot, and we needed to
execute this:

cd /tftpboot
ln -s . tftpboot

The reason the Sun-4/110 would boot while the SPARCstation would not is
that the 4/110 PROM is set up to ask for a program called boot.sun4 via
tftp.  The in.tftpd on the server is set up (by the standard inetd.conf)
to be invoked as "in.tftpd -s /tftpboot", which means that the 4/110 is
really asking for /tftpboot/boot.sun4, which exists.  However, the
SPARCstation is asking for tftpboot/boot.sun4c, which, given the
invocation of inetd, is really /tftpboot/tftpboot/boot.sun4c, which did
not exist.  The link above faked the existence of tftpboot/boot.sun4c
within the /tftpboot directory, allowing loading of the boot program.  We
were disgusted that a lousy 1-byte link kept our SPARCstation down for a
week.  Hats off to the guys from Sun that figured this one out.  I think
we would enentually have figured out the problem by using a program that
grabs tftp packets and reads the file name they are requesting, but it
would have taken a while.