I recently (read: today) purchased a SS4 to serve as a NAT machine for my
home LAN (and to get some experience dealing w/ Sun boxen).  However, the
machine does not have a floppy or a CDROM, making it very hard to boot off
of traditional boot medium (floppy, CD, etc.).

I read the installation docs for the sparc port, and from what I read it
is possible to boot off of the network and install from there.  However,
beyond the initial description of what needs to happen I find the
documentation lacking.  By using both the install docs as well as the
netboot HOWTO I have taken my best shot and done the following things to
prepare (it's a Linux server):
 
 1) Made machine ready to handle RARP for the SS4 when I get the MAC
 2) Setup TFTP on the server and copied the
    sparc/installation/netboot/boot.net file over there (to be symlinked
    to the hexip.archname when I get the name of the box)
 3) setup rpc.bootparams to use this:
     client root=phat-tom:/export/client/root
 4) Unpacked kern.tar.gz base.tar.gz and etc.tar.gz to
    /export/client/root
 5) Made the /export/client/root/dev/console file (mknod c 0 0)
 6) Exported the / FS w/ root RW perms (only to the client)
 7) copied the /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.4.1/sparc/* files to
    /export/client/root/NetBSD-1.4.1/* 
 8) Edited root/etc/hosts root/etc/myname and root/etc/fstab to the specs
    in the install.html file (fstab is like this:
       phat-tom:/export/root/client / nfs rw 0 0 )

Am I missing any crucial steps here required to get the machine to boot
the system needed to do an install to a harddrive?  If I have to netboot
this machine, is this the proper procedure, or should I have a much more
stripped-down /root somewhere?  If someone could provide the steps (or a
link to a document that's a little bit clearer) to get a SS4 netbooting
and ready to install via FTP -OR- NFS to a hard-drive physically attached
to the machine, please let me know.  If there is another way to just get
the system online with enough stuff to start an FTP install, that is also
a perfectly acceptable way ot installing.

Thanks for your help.

-Robert

-- 
.----------------- PGP Key: `finger gashalot@gashalot.com` -----------------.
| Robert Gash                        |          Work - gashalot@fasturl.net |
| Senior Systems Administrator       |     Personal - gashalot@gashalot.com |
| VenerNet Inc -- www.fasturl.net    |              http://www.gashalot.com |
`---- PGP Key Fprint:  78 5D 64 D2 99 F3 D8 A0  B2 56 DF EF F2 C6 D3 DF ----'