>>>>> "gs" == Georg Schwarz <georg.schwarz%freenet.de@localhost> writes:
gs> Has anyone experience with netbooting an iMac G3 350 MHz? I've
gs> got one such model whose CD-ROM seems to be broken. Can I
gs> expect netbooting NetBSD to work on that machine?
I don't know.
I was able to netboot revision 1 / revision a iMac, the kind that has
a fan and a metal shield inside the transparent blue case and a
mezzanine PCI slot. I was unable to netboot slightly newer machines
using the same infrastructure that booted the old iMac. To see how I
netbooed the old iMac you'd have to search the list because I don't
remember.
Here is a URL about netbooting the newer machines which may hint at
some of the nonstandard pieces (this entirely missing BSDP blob):
http://www.bombich.com/mactips/bootpd.html
it sounds to me like BSDP is actually inside the ROM, but maybe it is
in a stage2 loader instead. I think it's in the ROM because I see
nothing in his description of how such a stage2 would be loaded, and
also look at the ``client has already netbooted once'' case where the
BSDP server answers the *original* query, the one answered by only the
DHCP server in the ``client has never booted before'' case---at this
point there can be no stage2 running on the client because it doesn't
have an IP yet, but the BSDP answer is still parsed by the client.
Anyway, if BSDP is in ROM, I think any machines that use it are beyond
our current methods to netboot. He does link to source code for the
BSDP server, though.
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