poffen@sj.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger) (09/26/89)
Recently I posted a problem regarding slow booting of a diskless client over the network. The most annoying problem was the second stage boot of vmunix that would just hang apparently forever sometimes. I got several responses from some people that had similar problems and also some suggestions. One suggestion came from Sun engineering themselves. I replied to some of the people but I realize that a post here might benefit a lot of people because it appears to be a more widespread problem. The first problem was the first stage boot of the boot program. This is controlled by the prom in the booting machine. The Sun engineer relayed that there are some problems with early PROM's and 2.8.3 versions should fix that. This problem isn't as annoying as the second stage since it always completed eventually. The second stage problem turned out to be an old version of the boot.sun3 program from pre-4.0.3 that didn't get upgraded by sunupgrade to 4.0.3. Apparently, according to Sun, the boot program was significantly re-written for 4.0.3 to correct several problems. Luckily I had another server in our building that had 4.0.3 from a full install that I copied and it works MUCH better. Many thanks to all who responded and especially to Sun engineering for providing the clues that led me to the solution. Russ Poffenberger DOMAIN: poffen@sj.ate.slb.com Schlumberger Technologies UUCP: {uunet,decwrl,amdahl}!sjsca4!poffen 1601 Technology Drive CIS: 72401,276 San Jose, Ca. 95110 (408)437-5254 ------------------------- In a dictatorship, people suffer without complaining. In a democracy, people complain without suffering.