On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, Eric Delcamp wrote:

> I have an old ISA motherboard with a 486DX4 on it. I could put a 3COM509 on
> it, and I want to boot NetBSD from a NetBSD server. Some questions come to
> my mind:
> - how to do this ? The network card have a socket on it for a boot eprom,
> but I don't have one, and nothing to do something similar on the BIOS (like
> some recent motherboard).
> - I need at least a FAQ for the server side (what option for the kernel,
> DCHP, RBOOT, ...).
> - Oh, before anything, is it possible with such hardware ?

Well, actually, you could try updating the motherboard bios, but I
wouldnt' spend too much time on it.  A couple of suggestions would be to
either find a card with the rom on it... find a rom for your card, or, and
this is the cheapest, use local hardware (floppy drive comes to mind) to
boot the kernel, which can then drive the network board and bring the
system up that way.  

Regards,

Chris

===============================================================================
Christopher Smith(chriss@pubserv.com)			Prgramer^W Programmer
Prime Synergy of Champaign, IL.
-------------------------------------
"Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and
weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes
and weigh only 1.5 tons." -- Popular Mechanics, March 1949 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------