I've set up a nim environment involving several lpars on a 570. Everything is on the same subnet, same vlan, same netmask. I've used the nim to build a couple of the lpars without a problem. But when I've been trying to build the two most recent servers I keep getting the error messages:

BOOTP: request fail: 2


There is no difference between as far as networking between the servers that work and don't work. Which has me scratching my head.

After the servers are built and configured as NIM clients there are no issues with backing the server up. It's just that initial install that I'm having a problem with.

Never mind. I found my mistake. I had recently gone through these set of servers and turned off the services that were not needed (everything in inetd). I turned off the 'bootps' service on the nim master, which is required for remote installs.

Nice to know, thanks. I wanted to do the same things, i wold have had the same problems with my Nim installs.

OK. I'll add another thing to this. Not a BOOTP problem, but another gotcha in NIM. Don't list /proc in /etc/exclude.rootvg. If you do the backup will fail everytime with a complaint about check_space.

check_space is a function in c_mkbosi that attempts to calculate the total amount of space that will be needed for a mksysb image. But since /proc lists most of it's attributes as '-' it will cause an error when the calculations are made.

Aaargh ! I just mistyped my own IP address when configuring my adapter, and then bootp failed... And I lost a lot of time looking for smart things before finding my stupid mistake.