Potato is Debian version 2.2, which was at the time frozen
It wasn't mirrored locally
I put it in a directory called /root/shared/ but that might make some people feel a bit awkward
You need to be careful about these numbers. This is where you get most wrong. It is a good idea to make the IP addresses used by the machines to be easy-to-translate numbers. They aren't gonna be accessed by the outer world anyway, so think about installation.
When loading the boot image from the network, SS5 seems to have a bar going round and round. Other machines seem to have the number of bytes loaded on the display. SS5 is quite unfriendly in this respect.
the full Linux system will start to boot. This *is* impressive. Especially, when you see the penguin at the top of the screen
Thanks go to debian-sparc mailing list for answering my question. There's about 3:1 ratio in getting the right answer, and right answer quick there... Thanks anyway.
Another thing with different versions... I could use rsh with just netstd on slink, but on potato, I needed rsh-server package. It's quite annoying. But the naming for the package is more sane than it was.
I had 17 machines to deal with, and that was a big task. Especially when I had to continue plugging in and unplugging the monitor and the keyboard for local control
although not too remote because at this time, the machines were not globally ip-reachable. Only one machine could access outside, and something had to be done. It was okay installing telnetd, with ftp and dpkg -i, but I would seriously like doing an apt-get from each of the machines.
Note that you have the trailing newline. Or, it will not work. You have to finish it with a newline. It is in many cases necessary to have a newline at the end of the file. So, it is worth noting that.
One thing worth noting is that every user must have one unique number that is consistent through all machines. Otherwise nfs gives you files that are assigned to random user names.