On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 06:22:58PM -0400, Paul Frommeyer wrote:
> 
> Mac's receive path is down. If that is the case (and maybe even if it
> isn't ;-), check the RJ-45 jack on the Mac to make sure all the little pins
> are happy and properly aligned.

there is a very good chance that this is indeed the case, however, see below.

> If the problem persists, consider a MacOS 8.X/9.X boot CD to verify the
> network connectivity. The symptoms are highly suggestive of a hardware
> problem of one sort or another...

no MacOS media, no cd burner, so that's out.  bad floppy drive, so there is
little chance of me booting a netbsd floppy to figure this out.

in the meantime, i went to my friend's house and yanked a couple of the 2G disks
out of an AlphaServer 2100A that isn't running yet (and wouldn't be using those
disks anyway) and brought them home to make a boot disk for the 8600 since i
am completely unable to make it boot off of the PCI IDE card.

so i was thinking, put a disk in the thinkpad+dock since it has scsi on the
dock and is running NetBSD, but then i remembered that enabling the scsi on
that thing hangs it when it boots.  crap.  well, there is always one of the
sun boxes.

sooooo........

how hard would it be to make a bootable NetBSD disk for a mac on a solaris
machine?

i was thinking maybe to dd a 2G disk image from /dev/zero, mount it up as a vnd
and disklabel/fsck/install netbsd onto it from the thinkpad and then dd that
image to the disk on the sun box.  but then i remembered that since i was
netbooting the mac in the first place, i pretty much have an already installed
system on the thinkpad, all i would have to do is copy it over to the vnd and
put boot sector cruft in there.

does pax grok /dev entries correctly?

i might just have to take a stab at this.  then i can use the PCI 3Com 100Mbit
card instead of the probably broken onboard mace.

thanks!!!

-brian
-- 
"The cats tend to administer themselves, and contrary to the expected facts,
the house and everything in it was installed for their benefit."   -- Nic Clews