Hi, where I work, we need to be able to do
remote installs of solaris 8. All the machines that need to be able to do this are Intel. As it is now, we do this with solaris 2.6 no problem. It was my job to make this work on solaris8.

Anyways, I have a bootparamd server, an export file system, and the proper MAC address in /etc/ethers .. For testing purposes, Im using machines that are already setup. When the client machine boots up, I configure it to boot from the NIC. Using snoop I see whats happening. It goes through WHOAMI stuff, the server tells it, you are this host. Then it says it wants to mount stuff, yada yada.. and it gets to the point where it wants to boot the kernel. It transfers several files (via snoop I can watch), and the minute it tries to boot the transfered kernel, the machine crashes and resets so fast I cannot see the error message.

I've done single step, with verbose on, and watched the process, step by step. All goes well until the minute it tries to boot /kernel/genunix .. It just resets. You can see the kernel boot message before it resets, and you can see what looks like an error before the system reboots.

I assume becaues the NFS mounts happen, and everything else seems happy, that its not something as simple as not having nfs mounts, or permissions, etc. What it looks like is for some reason the kernel is crashing, which causes the machine to reset.

Some information... The server and the client are identical in hardware. They are both p4's with 512mb ram, and a 3c905c NIC.

Thanks for any help.