On Mon, Jul 06, 1998 at 07:19:34PM -0400, dbj@netbsd.ORG wrote:
> 
> "Soren S. Jorvang" <soren@t.DK> writes:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I have now configured my Turbo Color for netbooting and
> > I even have a suitable monitor cable with it. No
> > ADB keyboard, though.

I currently do not have a keyboard (nor a soundbox right now)
connected to my (ADB) station, but now that I found a
suitable monitor cable in my cable pile, I might as well
find myself some old Macintosh keyboard somewhere as well.

> Hmm.  One other person reported an unsuccessful netboot of
> a Turbo machine, reported some ethernet errors printed on
> rom console.
> 
> > Since the boot process for me just stops after
> > the NeXT box tftp-ing over the boot loader,
> > I tried building a new boot loader.
> 
> So I presume that the last thing printed on the framebuffer is a line
> of dots?  Can you tcpdump and see anything else going on?  Is there a
> host publishing the arp entry for the NeXT?  (I think this is needed
> to make tftp work though so you probably have that.)

I just see the 'Booting from network' screen with the BNC
animation spinning while it gets a bootp reply and loads
the boot loader via tftp. After that, the animation just
stops and nothing more appears.

The only suspicious thing I see are a handful of packets
from the tftp server after the animation on the NeXT stops.

The NeXT does not send any packets after the animation stops.

I haven't tried looking at those packets yet.

> Thanks for the patch.  I also took out the header files.
> 
> > I am hoping that I will get some output on the serial port,
> > since the PROM printfs do not appear on the framebuffer (I set
> > 'use Serial A as alternate console' to yes, but I don't know
> > what it means exactly, once I figure out how the wiring
> > is supposed to be for the NeXT serial port.
> 
> The next serial cable is special.  There's a man page under NeXTstep
> (maybe zs? or serial?) that has the wiring.  I made two by cutting a
> mac parallel printer cable in half and connecting DB-25's to them.
> If you don't find the wiring elsewhere, ping the list.  Someone
> certainly has it, or I can dig up the man page.

I bought a pre-made (cut-up Mac cable it looks like). I just
cannot seem to find a suitable combination of gender benders
and various adapters to make it work right now.

I can't be bothered to warm up the soldering iron right now,
so I will probably just go to sleep soon.

Once I know I have both framebuffer and a working serial console,
I will try debugging by printf.

> I don't really know all the implications of "use Serial A as
> alternate console?"  I've never seen it do anything on my next,
> it might just set a bit in the structure passed to the kernel on boot.
> 
> Please keep me up to date on your progress.  I also don't know how
> much the rom version matters for this.  For reference, I originally

The ROM version is 'NeXT Computer @ 1992 Rev 3.3 v74'.

> developed this by using the serial port first before I was able
> to talk to the rom monitor.  I wrote the original serial port
> driver by frobbing the serial port registers directly as
> from inside the kernel by writing loadable kernel modules.
> Hopefully we won't have to resort to this again.
> 
> >
> > > -- > Soren
> 
> Any objections to CC'ing this thread to port-next68k?  Someone
> there might have more rom console clue, and I'm sure people
> there could use shared booting problems.

Not at all.

> I'll let you know if I think of anything else.


-- 
Soren