rs6000 as diskless sun server

[Steve Losen]

I finally managed to get a diskless sun 3/50 to boot from a rs6000.

I already had the 3/50 booting off a sun server, but wanted to switch
to the rs6000.  I followed the instructions in /usr/etc/install/README
on the rs6000.  I copied over the root partition, /tftpboot stuff,
enabled the bootparamd and tftpd on the rs6000 and ran the arp command,
etc.  I couldn't copy the /dev files (neither tar nor cpio would build
them on the rs6000) so I had to build the /dev files for the 3/50 root
on the rs6000 with MAKEDEV and that's where I ran into trouble.
Evidently SunOS and AIX encode the major/minor device numbers
differently, so when I booted up the 3/50, as soon as it tried to use a
file in /dev, it bombed.  When I ran "ls -l" on the rs6000 all the
major/minor numbers were correct, i.e., identical to /dev on a sun.
But when I NFS mounted the 3/50 root partition on a sun and inspected
the dev directory with  "ls -l", the major/minor numbers were
completely different (and wrong).  To fix the problem I had to NFS
mount the 3/50 root partition read/write with root access on a sun and
run MAKEDEV on the sun.  This left the major/minor device numbers
looking correct on the sun, but wrong on the rs6000.  The 3/50 booted
and ran fine, however.

We are running AIX 3.1.3 on the rs6000 and SunOS 4.1 on the sun.

Actually we are running "xkernel" on the 3/50, which essentially
turns it into a X terminal.  You boot up a very stripped down
SunOS kernel and replace "init" with a shell script that runs a
single process -- the X server.  This makes a sun 3/50 with only
4M of memory quite useful.
-- 
Steve Losen                     scl at virginia.edu

University of Virginia Academic Computing Center