I recently lucked into a well-preserved 25mhz NextStation for $100. Tonight I
spent $60 on new SIMMs to bring it from 8mb to 20mb, and set it up to netboot
1.4 from my HPUX server (patiently awaiting NetBSD/parisc!). The sole purpose
of this NeXT (for now) is to track -current and hopefully produce snapshots,
although the keyboard & display are so nice I may start using it as an xterm.

Some notes:

    1. The NeXT appears to ignore the 'bf' BOOTP tag and insists on loading a
	file called "boot". I didn't want it loading /tftpboot/boot so I used
	the 'hd' tag to have it load /tftpboot/client/boot.
    2. vm=auto did not work for me. Apparently the HPUX bootpd sends an RFC1048
	reply in that case, and the NeXT discarded that, so it eventually times
	out. After checking the man page I tried vm=cmu ("send CMU style
	replies instead of RFC1048") and that worked nicely.
    3. Frequently the netboot gets an "enintr timed out" at about the end of
	the kernel's text section. It hasn't done this twice in a row yet, but
	I thought I should report this since it sounds like a fixable bug.
    4. Average uptimes suck. Panics in pmap (enter, I think) and freelist. By
	rebooting and continuing, I was able to set up /dev and my usual mortal
	account, and started building tcsh from source (I break in new scratch
	machines by building tcsh and cvs from source and installing them in
	/usr/local/bin). It crashed again while exiting from the link of tcsh.

(sigh) For the time being I'm letting it run NeXTStep (which is what I'm using
to edit the draft of this email) because I need to verify that the new DRAM is
good before the return policy expires (Mmmm, Fry's).

Any suggestions about what I should due to improve the reliability of this
dude? It's much nicer than my three Mac IIci's (all of which appear to be
suffering from "the ncrscsi problem"). Here's the dmesg I managed to extract:

[ preserving 225584 bytes of netbsd a.out symbol table ]
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999
    The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
    The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

NetBSD 1.4 (GENERIC) #0: Mon May 10 05:00:16 PDT 1999
    root@mourning.zlz.net:/u1/netbsd-1-4/obj.next68k/GENERIC
NeXT/MC68040 CPU+MMU+FPU, 4k on-chip physical I/D caches
real mem  = 20963328
panic: pmap_remove: PA not in pv_tab
rebooting...
[ preserving 225584 bytes of netbsd a.out symbol table ]
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999
    The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
    The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

NetBSD 1.4 (GENERIC) #0: Mon May 10 05:00:16 PDT 1999
    root@mourning.zlz.net:/u1/netbsd-1-4/obj.next68k/GENERIC
NeXT/MC68040 CPU+MMU+FPU, 4k on-chip physical I/D caches
real mem  = 20963328
avail mem = 16871424
using 255 buffers containing 1044480 bytes of memory
mainbus0 (root)
intio0 at mainbus0
zsc0 at intio0
zstty0 at zsc0 channel 0
zstty1 at zsc0 channel 1
xe0 at intio0
xe0 at MAC address 00:00:0f:00:d4:67
nextkbd0 at intio0
wskbd0 at nextkbd0: console keyboard
nextdisplay0 at mainbus0: 1152 x 832, 2bpp
wsdisplay0 at nextdisplay0: console (mono, vt100 emulation)
Looks like a MCS1850 (new style) clock chip.
wscons: wskbd0 glued to wsdisplay0 (console)
boot device: xe0
mountroot: trying nfs...
nfs_boot: trying DHCP/BOOTP
nfs_boot: DHCP server: 0xa000003
nfs_boot: my_name=yoda.toddpw.net
nfs_boot: my_addr=0xa000500
nfs_boot: my_mask=0xff000000
root on bespin:/cargo/export/yoda/root
root time: 0x382e6dc3
WARNING: clock lost 19671 days
root file system type: nfs
init: copying out path `/sbin/init' 11

# eof

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com