Installing Debian on a SGI Indy
After I had finally found a solution to my 13W3-VGA adapter issue the time is ready to install Debian onto the machine.
There are lots of howtos out there which cover netinstalling Debian/mips onto an SGI machine, hence most of them predate the official Debian/mips manual.
One caveat is the fact the manual was written for a bootstrap server running Linux in mind (have a look at section 4.3.2 Enabling the TFTP Server).
Since my bootstrap server is running FreeBSD a slight variation of the steps as lined out in section 4.3.2 is needed.
Path MTU discovery is disabled like this:
#sysctl net.inet.tcp.path_mtu_discovery=0
To further restrict source ports for TFTP to stay below 32767 as required by most elder SGI PROM versions these additional commands must be run:
#sysctl net.inet.ip.portrange.first=2048
#sysctl net.inet.ip.portrange.last=32767
This will effectively allow bootstrapping the Debian/mips netinst image from a FreeBSD host.
