Hi all,

I've just bought a nice, shiny little fanless system to use
as a firewall and modem server etc., to replace my ancient
white-box celeron system (which is running NetBSD-current) which
appears to have had a disk die.  Interestingly, the Box is still
running, still doing firewall duties, but anything that accesses
that disk, such as logging in, siezes in disk-wait.

Anyway, this VIA EPIA "PD" board claims to do PXE boot, and it
certainly seems to over one of the two ethernet ports, anyway,
but it looks as though the pxeboot_i386.bin loader is crashing
the system.  Basically, I was wondering if anyone on the list
has tried this setup before, or one like it, and knows of any
necessary tweaks that aren't mentioned in the NetBSD Diskless
how-to document.

I've followed the diskless how-to pretty closely, and the first
several stages seem to go OK:  Dhcpd logs show the IP address
exchange.  Tftpd logs show pxeboot_i386.bin being fetched.
However at that point the PC console screen clears and nothing
further seems to happen.  Pressing keys within five seconds (to
get pxeboot interactive prompt) does nothing.  No attempt seems
to be made to mount the NFS partitions.

This is my first go at PXE-booting something.  Does the pxeboot
loader have a specific ethernet controller device driver
compiled into it, or is ethernet interfacing something provided
by the PXE-boot ROM, as a BIOS service or the like?  I.e., might
I need to re-build pxeboot with a VIA Rhine III (6103?) driver
in it?

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew