[ sent in private mail to me, posted to the list with permission. ]

> As Chris G. Demetriou wrote...
> 
> > have you tried just booting ez0?  or eza0?  i've seen lots of cases
> 
> Very close. I skimmed the Digital network with a fine comb and the
> end result is that Jensen decides on the protocol to use based on 
> which device you boot:
> 
>  boot era0  ->> MOP
>  boot ez0   ->> BOOTP
>  boot ez0a  ->> BOOTP
> 
> There are now such things like variables to be set or options to be added
> on the Jensen console. This machine is apparantly too old to have such 
> features.

Right.  Those are only present in "new SRM," which doesn't run on the
Jensen.


> But the showstopper proved to be quite nasty: it is SRM version related.
> I downgraded my Jensen using a very old (V2.9 / August 1994) firmware CD.
> DEC-internal info showed that more people had struggled and apparantly
> succeeded using older firmware. The bootp server stuff was OK to start with.

Yuck.  The failure you were seeing was:

> >>> boot ez0a
> INIT-S-CPU...
> AUDIT_BOOT_STARTS ... 
>
>   84 FAIL
>
> >>>

How long between the AUDIT_BOOT_STARTS and the FAIL?
If it's not too much trouble to get you to change your firmware a
couple more times, could you tcpdump that boot sequence with "tcpdump
-vv"?


An experience from before I came to work at DEC, reported to various
people before I came to DEC (in other words, this has all been said
before, and I'm not trying to give the company a bad name 8-):

At one point, I updated the firmware on a DEC 3000/300LX that I had
access to, and it no longer booted correctly.  It generated packets
with bad IP checksums.  With the latest version of the firmware
available as of the time I left CMU (end of April, or so), this was
still a problem.  At one point i mentioned it to someone inside of
Digital, and he asked around, and apparently it was claimed to be a
hardware problem.  Thankfully, downgrading the firmware fixed it.

I don't know if that problem is still present in the current firmware,
and I no longer have access to that system.



> Before I had ROM version 2.2 which is the latest and greatest for
> Jensen.

Do you know what firmware CD that came from?  I forget where it
started to break on my 3000/300LX, but I _think_ it was around version
3.6 of the firmware (as printed on the CD, or as you'd find expressed
in subdir names in ftp://ftp.digital.com/pub/DEC/Alpha/firmware; I
don't know what version(s) that corresponds to SRM printing, anymore).


chris