Re: Failing to netboot

On 29 Apr 2025, at 17:49, Alexander Schreiber <als%thangorodrim.ch@localhost> wrote:

Hmm, I keep hearing anecdotes about modern (GBit) switches technically
being able to drop down all the way to 10 MBit/s, but that not working
all that well - maybe try a more ... "period correct" (e.g. tops out at
100 MBit/s) switch, which _might_ work better with 10 MBit/s clients?

Yes, this is essentially what I’ve been thinking.

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.

Whoops, make that OBP 2.9

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.

That NAS presumably runs _some_ version of Linux, which leaves another
trap: Does the NAS support NFSv2 and is it enabled? I don't have experience
with port-sparc netbooting, but the port-sparc64 loader only supports
NFSv2, which these days tends to be turned off by default on Linux and
is generally not longer tested by Linux distributions (IIRC Redhat went
all way to "not officially supported anymore”)