Using RS/6000 as server for diskless suns

[Steve Losen]

I'm having trouble setting up a RS/6000 as a boot server for a diskless
sun 3/50.  To further complicate matters, I am turning the 3/50 into
an X terminal using the xkernel package (which is essentially
instructions for configuring a very stripped down SunOS kernel and
booting it up to run one process -- the MIT X11.4 server).  I have
succeeded in getting xkernel to work on this 3/50 using a sun as a boot
server, but I'm having trouble with the RS/6000.

The kernel boots fine and it sucessfully NFS mounts / and /usr, but when
it fires up the X server, the X server cannot open or ioctl /dev/fb.  I tried
some other stuff and and ld.so had similar trouble with /dev/zero.
When I set up the RS/6000 as a server I had to run MAKEDEV on the RS/6000 to
make all the devices in the diskless sun's /dev.  (I couldn't get tar or
cpio to make them from my original xkernel tree on the sun server).  When I
compare the diskless /dev on the sun server with RS/6000 I have the same
files with the same major/minor numbers.  Some owners and groups are
different, but I attribute that to different group/gid and loginid/uid
associations on the two machines.

I am using a RS/6000 540 running AIX 3.1 3003.0018

I have exported the diskless root tree read/write with access= and
root= set to the diskless sun.  It looks to me like the RS/6000 NFS server
is somehow making the /dev files unusable on the sun.  Before starting up
the X server, the diskless sun successfully runs ifconfig, hostname, route,
and mount.  I don't know if any of these commands use anything in /dev.

Does this sort of problem ring a bell with anyone else out there?
-- 
Steve Losen                     scl at virginia.edu

University of Virginia Academic Computing Center