Re: Failing to netboot

[Matthew Wallis <mattw%madmonks.org@localhost>]

> On 29 Apr 2025, at 03:46, mike.spooner.ux <mike.spooner.ux%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
> I've seen this error before with multiple different O/S netboot files, including even Solaris. The problem is almost always an interrupted transfer (from the perspective of the OBP TFTP client, which is very basic). This can sometimes be due to an incompatibility between the OBP and the network infrastructure or TFTP server - especially around IP-fragmented UDP packets, or shorter-than-expected (but completely valid and complete) packets.

Ahh, and finally my brain catches up and calls me out for being slack.

I’ve been having network issues with the slower devices on my network. I’ll get NetBSD installed but then can’t pull down any packages. Transfers start out ok, hitting speeds of 100 - 200kB/sec then just stall.

I have a MacSE 30 as well as the IPX that exhibits the same problem. I recently “solved” it on the Mac by setting net.inet.tcp.*buff_max to 8MB or so. It would still stall, but was more likely to recover.

This also happened to packages on NFS shares. 

I should look deeper into this. My thoughts have generally been that the switches were not doing 10/100 very well. I tried replacing the Ubiquiti switch I was using with a Netgear, same problem. 

In theory this problem shouldn’t really hit the boot.net file, it’s less than 70k in size, and I don’t think I ever saw anything fail that soon, but it could be part of it.

> Getting an older TFTP server software or upgrading the OBP version can help avoid this issue.

It’s on OBP 2.4 which I think is newest for these machines.

Tftp is sitting on a raspberry pi running Debian. Can try some other options. The contents are actually being NFS mounted from a NAS, and try moving the files locally too.

Matt