First I had to make a TFTP server to install Debian on the Sparc Machines. The Sparc machines had no floppy drive and no CD-Rom drive. There was no other way than to install it from the network. Then, there was no working Sparc machine to use for installation, a machine had to be made available. Using a ix86 machine was chosen.
It was a Celeron machine, and installed Debian 2.1 cleanly from the CD-Rom. Then it was upgraded to Potato [1] due to some minor glitch I had with slink.[2]
It was simple. I had to recompile the kernel with RARP on, and restart the machine with the new kernel. I downloaded the boot-floppy images to one directory [3] , so that files like root.bin and base2_2.tgz are in there. I made a directory /home/tftpduser/ especially for it.
A line was added in inetd.conf
tftp dgram udp wait nobody /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/in.tftpd /home/tftpduser/
so that TFTP would work, and did kill -SIGHUP id-of-inetd to make effective the changes. In the directory, I had a file called something like boot_2.2.1.img there.
Another step is required to make a functioning server: NFS should be set up. I installed nfs-server via apt-get like: apt-get install nfs-server and changed /etc/exports like
/root/shared/ 192.168.1.16(rw,no_root_squash)
I added one line per each machine, but there might be a better way to do this than that. After adding enough, I typed /etc/init.d/nfs-server restart to make the changes effective