Re: NetBooting a Quadra from MacOS X

[Hauke Fath <hauke%Espresso.Rhein-Neckar.DE@localhost>]

At 12:08 Uhr +0200 27.4.2008, Andreas Wolf wrote:
>Now, netbooting from the OS X Macs ("Big brother
>is booting you") sort of bridges the gap, if you know what I mean.

As a late follow-up, there seems to be a communication problem between
MacOS X dhcpd and NetBSD kernels, see PR 38830
<http://www.NetBSD.org/cgi-bin/query-pr-single.pl?number=38830>. I don't
know if that's relevant here.
>
>Btw, there might be a little bug in the Booter code, that prevents the
>initial BootP/DHCP requests from working. If I have an additional NuBus
>Ethernet-card in my Quadra 700, the Booter will show (and use) the
>hardware address of that NIC, although the built-in Ethernet is in use
>and configured.

Since I've been bitten by this issue recently, I have looked into the
Booter sources some, and experimented... I had a code snippet at the time
that was supposed to tell MacTCP to ask its current LAP driver for the MAC
address. Since you select one when setting up MacTCP, that should be the
natural thing to do. What I didn't take into account was that the machines
I have here were all equipped with OpenTransport (v1.3, usually). And while
that generally implements the old MacTCP interfaces, there's limits to that
compatibility. And what OT has in place of a LAP driver does bot bother to
fill in the 'struct LAPStats' provided with sensible data. Unfortunately,
it still returns noErr.

But, it turned out that the code actually works with MacTCP installed.
So... if you can build yourself a Booter from source, you can change the
#if 0 in udp.c#GetMyEnetAddress() to an #if 1 and run "real" MacTCP. The
code will then properly report the MAC address of the active network
interface.

Supporting that for OpenTransport needs more work, either to ask OT for a
list of interfaces plus information, or to add GUI elements for skipping
the BOOTP phase, and just set tftp server and kernel strings.

        hauke

--
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)