On Sun, 17 Mar 2002, Ben Harris wrote:

> In article <E16me4e-000Bys-0Y@anchor-post-34.mail.demon.net> you write:
> >I know they use bootp and NFS, but I can't figure out anything more - I've 
> >set up an NFS export and tried things like putting Obey files called !Boot or 
> >!NFSBoot, RiscPC !Boot applications and so on in it but I can't get any 
> >further. I know it gets an address successfully and queries the NFS server 
> >for the path it receives from the bootp server but that's as far as it goes. 
> >It just sits there and says "The network connection could not be established."
> 
> I don't know quite what the standard boot sequence is like.  I got mine from
> Stephen Borrill (alias Precedence Technologies), and I think his boot ROMs
> are non-standard.

They are actually just slightly enhanced to support standalone operation
and booting from Zip, CompactFlash, SMB, etc. in addition to NFS. The NCOS
1.06 Ethernet components are in there unaltered (e.g. DoBootP, NFSSTB) and
indeed normal operation is bootp and then NFS to a Unix machine. The
non-standard ones are the ones that force the NC to attempt to boot from
an NT server via NetBEUI and remove the NFS booting capability (not
mentioning any names...).

Probably worth getting in touch with us about NC-specific issues. We've
been running them from NetBSD since Oct 1996.

-- 
Stephen