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Booting Sun Sparc Servers


In early 2022 I got several Sun SPARC servers for free off of a FreeCycle ad: I was recently called out for not providing any sort of update on those devices… so here we go!

After some stumbles learning about the machine-type byte in the host ID, this machine was able to get past the NVRAM check, but failed during memory diagnostics. At boot time, Solaris will send out a broadcast request with its MAC address (configured via NVRAM) and then will listen for a response to auto-configure its IP. By default rarpd also checks if a bootable image, of a name starting with the IP address in hexadecimal upper-case letters, is present in the TFTP boot directory before it decides whether to respond to the RARP request.

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