[Aurora-sparc-user] Sun Netra T1 (105) with Disk Pack .. possible uses??

[Magnus]

Plasma wrote:
> Well .. I'm now stuck .. it won't install! Got a little further after 4 of
> those CHS errors, I got to take the options for auto partitioning, choose it
> was a server etc then it did this ..

I have the same machine and it sometimes runs Aurora, sometimes Ubuntu.  
Ubuntu has been easier to install.

The most common problems I've had trying to install Aurora have to do with:

1) Speed the install media was burned at.  For whatever reason, it works 
better if you burn your media at a slow speed.
2) Many sun machines (not the T1 105) need a CDROM firmware upgrade to 
boot properly from optical media
3) Aurora and other Linux distributions (including Ubuntu) overwrite the 
Sun disk label when they partition the hard disk(s).  This problem 
becomes most obvious if you are installing to a system with two or more 
hard disks.  I have talked to the Aurora maintainers about this and 
filed a bug report and I'm confident they will deal with this before the 
next major release.  But to get around this I manually partition my 
disks, offsetting the first partition by 1M past the beginning of the disk.

A lot of my install issues went away with my Sun farm by setting up a 
netboot environment.  Most of the HOWTO's tell you to set up bootp, 
which is certainly needed for much older Suns than what you're working 
with.  But in your case, you can netboot from dhcp (something the 
HOWTO's seldom cover).

Example of one of my Sun Netra hosts in dhcpd.conf:

host arothron {
        hardware ethernet 00:03:ba:05:cc:90;
        ddns-hostname arothron;
        filename "C0A83705";
        server-name "diodon";
        next-server 192.168.55.1;
        fixed-address 192.168.55.5;
}

You do still need to set up tftp per the HOWTO's.

Then at the ok prompt I "boot net:dhcp".