# PXE Boot on a Sun Fire T1000



## Maelstorm (May 28, 2015)

I'm picking up a used server machine.  It is a Sun Microsystems Sun Fire T1000 with a Sparc 3 CPU running at 1 GHz with 8GB Ram and a 80GB HDD.  This is a headless server, so I am going to have to use a serial console.  I also have a FreeBSD 9.3 machine running a AMD Athlon T-Bird 1400MHz CPU that I want to configure as a PXE boot and install server.  With this in mind, I have a few questions:

What software do I need to get PXE up and running on the 9.3 machine?
What image should I download for the Sparc machine?
I've only used Sparc machines as a workstation user, never as an admin, and that was using actual Solaris.  Is there anything that I should be aware of?
From what I have seen, Sparc firmware seems to have significantly more intelligence than the i386 BIOS systems that I have been using.  Is there anything that I need to configure, firmware wise, to get FreeBSD to work?
I am quite familiar with the MBR and GPT partitioning schemes (I've been writing software for them.).  What does Sun use?  What is expected?  It is similar to MBR? UEFI? Or something else?
The machine doesn't even have the provision to connect a keyboard/mouse/monitor to it.  It doesn't even have USB ports.  So how to I use a serial console?  What are the default settings that FreeBSD uses for the serial port?
Related to #1 and #2, what is the procedure to setup a PXE boot server?
I am hoping to get some answers to some of these questions so I can proceed somewhat intelligently on setting this new machine up.  This machine will not be running as a server though.  I plan on using it as a test bed for software development as many of my software projects use alot of bit fiddling so endiness issues come into play.  Sparc, PowerPC, MIPS, IBM s/360, and others are big endian machines while the i386 and amd64 machines are little endian.

EDIT:  The CPU is a UltraSPARC T1 Mutli-Core processor.


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## canoodle (Jun 28, 2019)

Thanks for stopping by, your post is 4 years old but i try to answer anyway.

I am also pretty new to FreeBSD and have a t1000 sitting around.

yes it has no VGA no USB no nothing, all you will need is a LAN port X-D isn't it.

1. connect your t100 ("SC net mgt" LAN interface) and your (linux based?) PC/Laptop to a router with DHCP enabled

2. use wireshark / nmap to find the ip of your t1000 (eth.src == 00:21:28:17:8b:XX)

3. ssh login to ILOM continue from there

booting custom stuff: (untested)

Maybe this documentation about Oracle "JumpStart" https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-6397/
can help.

might not be exactly what you want but try to run FreeBSD as virtual machine  Solaris "zones"

stay on it!


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