Problem booting a SPARCstation 1 diskless client using SunOS 4.0.3

[Joseph C. Konczal]

I have a new SPARCstation 1 (Sun4c) with two hard disks.  The Sun4c
will not boot from the disks (no preinstalled operating system), and
it has no tape drive, so I followed the instructions to make my Sun3 a
server so that I could boot the Sun4c as a diskless client.  (I
upgraded my Sun 3/280 from SunOS 4.0.1 to 4.0.3 a couple weeks ago and
installed the version of libc.so with resolver routines that use a
nameserver, which Sun has made available on uunet.uu.net.)  When I try
to boot the Sun4 over the internet this is what I get:

Booting from: le(0,0,0)vmunix
21a00 Using IP Address 129.6.48.12 = 8106300C		;client's address
				;a very long delay, half an hour or longer
Boot: RPC call failed (status 4)
Boot: bad dialog with bootparam server (error 0x4)
Boot: unable to mount root (error 0x4)
root on  fstype
Boot:							;hangs here forever


The bootparamd and mountd are up along with eight nfsd's:

mail-gw$ps ax
  PID TT STAT  TIME COMMAND
    0 ?  D     0:00 swapper
    1 ?  I     0:01 /sbin/init -
    2 ?  D     0:00 pagedaemon
   45 ?  I     0:29 portmap
   60 ?  I     0:10 in.named
   80 ?  I     0:00 syslogd
   89 ?  I     0:01 /usr/lib/sendmail -bd -q1h
   97 ?  I     0:00  (nfsd)
   98 ?  I     0:00  (nfsd)
   99 ?  I     0:00  (nfsd)
  100 ?  I     0:00  (nfsd)
  101 ?  I     0:00  (nfsd)
  102 ?  I     0:00  (nfsd)
  103 ?  I     0:00  (nfsd)
  104 ?  I     0:00  (nfsd)
  105 ?  IW    0:00 rpc.mountd -n
  111 ?  I     0:01 rarpd ie0 mail-gw.ncsl.nist.gov
  115 ?  I     0:05 rpc.bootparamd
  132 ?  I     3:56 update
  136 ?  I     0:00 cron
  151 ?  I     0:02 inetd
  155 ?  I     0:00 /usr/lib/lpd
  168 ?  IW    0:00 - D2400 ttyh0 (getty)
  169 ?  IW    0:00 - D2400 ttyh1 (getty)
...
  182 ?  IW    0:00 - PC9600 ttyhf (getty)
 3120 ?  I     0:01 rpc.mountd
 3524 ?  IW    0:00 - PC9600 ttyh5 (getty)
 4057 ?  I     0:00 - D2400 ttyh2 (getty)
   49 co IW    0:00 keyserv
  120 co IW    0:00 rpc.statd
  121 co IW    0:00 rpc.lockd
  212 co IW    0:00 - std.9600 console (getty)
...
mail-gw$


The filesystems for the client exist and are exported by the server:
(The server is mail-gw and the client is sunmgr.)

mail-gw$exportfs
/home/export/root/sunmgr.ncsl.nist.gov -root=sunmgr.ncsl.nist.gov,access=sunmgr.ncsl.nist.gov
/home/export/swap/sunmgr.ncsl.nist.gov -root=sunmgr.ncsl.nist.gov,access=sunmgr.ncsl.nist.gov
/home/export/exec/kvm/sun4c
/usr/share
mail-gw$


mail-gw$cat /home/export/root/sunmgr.ncsl.nist.gov/etc/fstab
mail-gw.ncsl.nist.gov:/home/export/root/sunmgr.ncsl.nist.gov / nfs rw 0 0
mail-gw.ncsl.nist.gov:/home/export/exec/sun4 /usr nfs ro 0 0
mail-gw.ncsl.nist.gov:/home/export/exec/kvm/sun4c /usr/kvm nfs ro 0 0
mail-gw.ncsl.nist.gov:/usr/share /usr/share nfs ro 0 0
#mail-gw.ncsl.nist.gov:/home/mail-gw.ncsl.nist.gov /home/mail-gw.ncsl.nist.gov nfs rw 0 0
#mail-gw.ncsl.nist.gov:/export/crash /var/crash nfs rw 0 0
mail-gw$


I called the Sun hotline almost 48 hours ago and they haven't been
able to figure it out yet.  Does anyone have any idea what is wrong?
Are there more daemons I need to run on the server?  When will the GNU
operating system be available?  (The SunOS 4.0.3 update contains a
limited warrenty notice that reminds me of the FSF no warrenty
statement, but SunOS 4.0.3 is not free, and the source costs even
more.)

  Joe Konczal