Network booting a p630 using tftp & dhcpd

[VAKKALANKA RAO Sridhar]

> > I recently built a "zImage" for the first time on a Pentium III and
> > installed tftp & dhcpd on it. After putting the zImage in the
> > "/tftpboot" directory, I tried to network boot the ppc64 (a p630-6E4)
> > at the firmware level. Here is the firmware output I got:
>
> ...
>
> > BOOTP: S=1   BOOTP R=6
> > FILE: zImage
> > BOOTP: read-first-block failed: 4
> > BOOTP ERROR: TFTP of first block failed, ABORT
> >         !20A80005!
>
> Looking for any tftp error messages in /var/log and also taking a dump
> of the network traffic with tcpdump would be useful. My guess is the
> client is trying to get a file that does not exist on the server.

You were asolutely right. After checking the log file on the dhcpd/tftp server, I discovered the message "Cannot resolve group for user nobody" when it tried to access the zImage. My network administrator got on to it and said that this was caused by the firewall on the dhcpd/tftp server and he turned it off. Subsequently, he changed all configurations from user "nobody" to "root". Even then the problem was not solved.

Well, the p630 has no floppy drive and is CD-bootable. Presently, my bootable CD installs a target AIX 5.1 O/S with no development environment. I have CD booted the p630 several times and found it to be very straight forward (at least for AIX). I am also told that SuSE sells such a CD for Linux on the p630.

Using my zImage, is there some way that I can burn a bootable CD so I don't have to rely on a network boot? In order to set up a network boot environment, I had to request my own private network within my organization, the execution of which was not easy.

Thanks again
Sri

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