Ubuntu on Sun's CoolThreads T1000

I wanted to test JBoss performance with the Sun Microsystems new CoolThreads CPU so i ordered one from the Try&Buy deal a week ago.And today it arrived. Small pizza-box with absolutely no printed documentation included (a lot of documentation on the web though). First i had to spend several hours figuring out planning how to actually install Ubuntu on the damn machine, because it doesn't have video output, keyboard or mice connectors or CD/DVD players. After wondering for a moment it all started to make sense, just configure your systems and use netboot (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/Sparc).

My laptop has Kubuntu 6.10 so setting up the required software for netboot would have seemed to be easy. But it wasn't, mainly because T1000 and my laptop refused to communicate with each other and RARP (or somebody) refused to send the boot.img to Sun thus causing it not to be able to boot. After Googling awhile i decided and trying to recompile tftpd with some patches and decided to disable our normal DHCP server and use DHCP instead of RARP. And to a great suprise it worked. T1000 still made out some statements about TFTP timeout but managed to load the boot.img from my laptop.

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