[rescue] SPARCstation 1 boot woes

[Mouse]

> I have always netbooted old SPARC systems.   It is very easy to do, with one$

My experience has been that the actual problem is autonegotiation.  It
takes time, long enough that early 10-only systems time out before
autoneg finishes and the link comes up.

If you connect it to another machine, or to a managed switch, you can
work around this by specifying 10/half on the peer (by whatever
mechanism is appropriate for the peer).  What I typically do is connect
them to a 10Mbit hub - yes, hub, not switch - I kept from back in the
days when 10Mbit was fast.  The hub's uplink takes time to cokme up,
but that doesn't bother anything, and it's stable by the time the host
in question tries to communicate.  The host-to-hub link, of course,
comes up as promptly as it did back in the day.

Depending on the SPARC, you may be able to work around it there, but
that's far more hit-or-miss than just using a 10Mbit hub, or an autoneg
device that's administratively forced to 10/half.

I too would suggest netbooting.  But then, I have plenty of other
machines around to be a netboot server (indeed, I leave one up on my
house LAN routinely), and plenty of experience netbooting.

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