I am a Cisco Engineer and have run into a problem with the boot process for UNIX servers running Solaris 5.6 & 5.8 OS. Currently the servers boot using RARP to discover IP configuration.

This works and is OK as long as everything is on the same network where the broadcasts are free to roam.

The network is being put into VLAN's with much smaller subnets where the RARP broadcast will not reach the RARP server. What alternatives are there for this version of Solaris.

I've been told that the BIOS on these boxes cannot accomodate BootP. BootP would solve the problem easily, is it possible that it can be run on this version?

Sorry for the lack of OS details, but I'm responsible for the network piece and am trying to present options to the server engineers.

Thanks!

I don't think there is a solution to that. You need to have a boot server on each vlan. Where I work now our jumpstart server has an interface on every subnet which works fine. Or you can designate one machine on each vlan as the boot server for that vlan, then just that one will need to be able to talk to the rarp server.

I would probably look at the first option if I were you. See if you can create virtual interfaces for your rarp server so it is on every vlan. That is by far the easiest if you can do it that way.

That's not strictly correct. Depending on the hardware being used it may be possible to use a DHCP based boot server, but this will mean some reworking of the installation setup.

You will also need to allow DHCP requests forwarding between VLANs, ideally only to the boot server.