On 20 Jul 2006, at 03:28, matthew sporleder wrote:

> http://www.mspo.com/soekris.html
>
> Although I didn't have to setup rarpd, (and now I'm wondering how I
> got away with that) I ran into a similar problem where dhcp wouldn't
> work correctly and fixed it by using a different switch.

It probably depends on what your client uses to get its IP address.
Sun SPARC boxes (at least all the classic ones) use RARP.  Most other
things I've seen or heard about use BOOTP/DHCP.

Since I really wanted to debug something _other_ than the netboot
process, I set up my Thinkpad 760XD running -current.  Its rarpd
answered the request and its tftp supplied the netboot secondary boot
program.

The secondary boot program first tries BOOTP/DHCP to get its boot
information.  I can confirm that BOTH of my MacOS X boxes attempted to
satisfy its desires.  Not only the machine I'd intended to use before,
but also the original iMac that's been standing in as NAT router until
I could get the real machine put together.  (For some weird reason,
"Internet connection sharing" starts bootpd with the undocumented "-P"
switch.  It must mean "promiscuous" or "permissive" because it will
hand out IP addresses to whoever asks, without regard to the contents
of its NetInfo "/machines" database.)  The configuration being
incomplete, the boot process failed.

Once the Macs were told to shut up (and killing bootpd on the iMac
caused me to lose my connection to the internet) I was able to net-
boot the SS10 from the Thinkpad.  For the time being, if I use the
Thinkpad to do the RARP/tftp thing, I could debug the rest of the Mac
netboot chain.

But that's really secondary to the goal of getting my SS10 set up and
running properly with the magma serial card.  Netboot was just a way
to keep from hosing the SS10's local disk during the debug process.

Thanks for the feedback.

John D. Baker                            NetBSD     Darwin/MacOS X
http://mylinuxisp(dot)com/(tilde)jdbaker/     OpenBSD            FreeBSD
BSD.  It just sits there and _works_.
GPG fingerprint = D703 4A7E 479F 63F8 D3F4  BD99 9572 8F23 E4AD 1645