This could very well prove be a long shot, but I'm still recovering from
a descent into PC hell and my current situation got me wondering just what
kind of grass roots sympathy resources exist in NetBSD land... Please copy
replies to me, as I am nearly a week behind on the NetBSD mailing lists
and have been for a month now...


I run the registration department for Anime Expo (www.anime-expo.org) this
year.  Our increased volume (plus a fiasco last year) means that I want to
more than triple the number of consoles we have this year. Due to other
people flaking and me being busy with the 1.4.2 release and registration
duties for mail-in registrations, I ended up running myself ragged over
Memorial Day weekend testing the hardware that was left over from last year,
just to find out how screwed we were. Then I tried to buy some replacement
PC guts, only to discover that the boards had Y2K bios problems!

I have to begin setup for our event on the 28th, and so I have a mere 3.5
weeks to conjure up about 20 machines that support PC keyboard/video.
Up to ten of these machines can be vt220's and I can still make everything
work, but after my source of those flaked I'd just as soon stick to PC's
and Multia's and SHARKs, whever everything already has ethernet on it.

Currently we have 8 fully working boxes, 1.5 boxes built but flaky due to
the aforementioned BIOS "issues", and parts for _maybe_ 3.5 more PC's if all
the issues can be resolved. I have decided to loan two modern PC's of my own
and also my CATS and SHARK, which gives us four more working boxes.

As it happens, an old roommate of mine saved six Multia's (minus various
parts) from the dumpster at his company recently and gave them to me.
Added to previous donations from him and Erik Berls (and my own Multia
that I bought in 1998), I now have enough parts for about 8.5 Multia's.

That gave me an idea. I spent about 8 hours total hacking it, but I now have
a modified 1.4.2 INSTALL kernel for Alpha that:
    a. uses a small PC 8x16 font (ripped from NetBSD/atari VGA support),
	so you get 80x34 text on the multia even when running at 640x480.
	(I know -current has wsfont, but I wanted to start with a release.)
    b. has telnet added to the instkernel ramdisk, and sysinst stuff stripped.
	I could strip it more but I only needed to make room for telnet.
	We are on a private net so ssh is not a requirement.
    c. can be netbooted, with the requisite admin setup of course.
	Currently the BOOTP/TFTP/NFS server is my Sparcbook 3GX running 1.4P.

My current test kernel (which needs to be changed from vt220 back to vt100)
can be found at  ftp://ftp.toddpw.org/telnet-ramdisk/netbsd.gz

So I nominally have 8 boxes that are essentially 34 line vt100's and 1-port
terminal servers packaged into the same case. (So far, one has been "burned
in" for about 10 hours which is how long we need them to run most days, and
it held up fine. The fact that I have begun disconnecting the fan speed
control thermistor to force the Multia fan to full speed probably helped.
Testing continues.)

I would also like to support printing to the serial port with remote lpr so
I can nuke the code that writes directly to the com ports on our existing
crap PC's, however I have a lot of other items left to do and can't justify
the time to work on this if I will also have to be putting more crap PC's
together in the next few weeks.

Right now I expect to have 8-10 crap PC's, 2 PC's and 2 arm32's of mine,
and the 8 multia's (which aren't all burned in yet so I'm worried that
some of them will prove to be heat death victims -- heck, I'm worried
about the crap PC's dying in battle as well, because a couple usually
flake out or croak outright every year.)

So at this point I want to locate and borrow about 10 machines,
preferably 15-20 so I have plenty of spares in case of mass multia heat
death disaster. (I might buy some if people are willing to sell, but
they'd have to be as cheap as junk MacIIci's with nubus ethernet which
is my emergency alternative plan, or about $50 per {disk,head}less box.)

Currently I have a proven setup based on Multia's, however I have reason to
believe that sharks will work even better for this; for example, I power my
personal shark from a disk drive power supply using a floppy adapter cable
but the Multia power supplies occasionally go senile and die -- this did in
fact happen to one of them last night, so I no longer have any spares.

We do have a requirement that 10 machines accept "keyboard wedge" barcode
readers, but my main test multia works great with the barcode reader so I
am not too worried if I discover later this weekend that that my shark
doesn't like the barcode reader.

The thought of offering my car (1999 Saturn 2-door, loaded) as collateral
for a loan of 20 sharks from the shark tower had crossed my mind. Besides,
I'd want to rent a van at that point anyway.

My driving route takes me from the SF Bay area to LA, and I will be making
another run in the next couple weeks to transfer (and test) more equipment.
(We have serially connected printers, plus I have to buy more barcode
readers...)

Once again, please send/copy any replies to me. I am seriously behind on
NetBSD mail because of all the crap I am juggling right now...

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com