2026-09-13 –, D.0.07
Being an avid collector of Sun Microsystems servers, the speaker has a few Sun2 machines from around 1983. The 2/50 can only netboot but it doesn't use NFS as that had not been invented yet. But surely, a moden *BSD can act as a boot server and run a diskless client? And for the 2/120, that does have SCSI disks, it surely can be used to do a network installation of SunOS?
Well, maybe. Depending on the which flavour of BSD you are using, how much perseverance you have and probably also how the stars are aligned. The speaker will discuss his efforts netbooting a 40+ year old Sun as well. If you have some antique hardware in your attic, this talk is for you! Or just come to listen to some obstacles that were encountered in the process (FreeBSD kernel panic anyone?).
Walter got his first BSD experience in the late 1980s on the university Sun computers. He started using FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 when he finally saved up for an 80386 machine and has been using it ever since. But he also uses NetBSD and OpenBSD on many of the UNIX system he collects and has collected. He was in the organising committee and program chair for EuroBSDCon 2002 but he is not a developer. Instead, he lives and breaths security in all forms.