davis@scrsu1.sdr.slb.com (Paul Davis) (03/11/89)
I have today just finished a conversation with a member of Sun's technical support team in the UK concerning the following problem: A client that is supposed to be served by a SunOS4.0 server *apparently* booted from a SunOS3.4 server. The latter does NOT have a file in /tftpboot corrresponding to the clients IP address, but did once serve as an nd server to the client when it ran 3.4. The nd.local file on the 3.4 server still contains an entry for this machine. What I have been told I find amazing/ridiculous/hard-to-believe. If you have more than one possible source of a client's root partition on the network (e.g. local disk, SunOS4.0 server, nd server ...) then even though the client will boot the correct kernel, there is no guarantee where it will get its root partition from. This was deemed a feature rather than a bug. Its not terribly obvious when this has happened that it has - all the common checks for version (/etc/motd, "strings /vmunix") work on disk files, not the kernel in memory. Moreover, having a 4.0 kernel and a 3.4 filesystem is not disastrous, but does lead to problems ... Has anyone else come across this (as Sun claim to have done) or have any comments on its bletcherousness ? thanks Paul Paul Davis at Schlumberger Cambridge Research <davis%scrsu1%sdr.slb.com@relay.cs.net>