Hi, all.

I practiced network installation on DEC3000/300 (TurboChannel based 1st
generation Alpha machines).  It seems NetBSD/alpha Web page and INSTALL
doc does not provide how to netboot TC Alpha, I summarise the steps here
for others sake.  The points are;

    o TC Alpha ROM console can do BOOTP/TFTP boot with >>> boot ez0
    o Before netboot, you have to prepare proper netboot.XXYYZZXXYYZZ

Comments and corrections are welcome.

--

1) Prepare boot server.  /etc/bootptab should have lines like;

	preparecan:\
        :ht=ethernet:ha=08002B3F57FF:\
        :ip=10.1.1.59:sm=255.255.255.0:sa=10.1.1.60:\
        :td=/tftpboot:hd=/:bf=netboot.08002b3f57ff:rp=/u0/alpha:

   Populate NFS root directory (/u0/alpha in this example) with base.tgz,
   etc.tgz and var.tgz, then configure /etc directory contents appropriately.
   (It'd be very helpful there was miniroot.tgz for minimum run, BTW)

2) Now complicated step.  Compile setnetbootinfo(8) program on the boot
   server.  This is required to modify primary boot code 'netboot' for
   the target machine.  Source files are located at
   /sys/arch/alpha/stand/setnetbootinfo/.  You probably need to change 4
   lines of codes because the original uses 64bit integer constants.   It
   would be ok to add 'LL' suffixes to them.

   With setnetbootinfo(8), modify 'netboot' burning target ether MAC address
   into it like;

	# cd /u0/alpha/usr/mdec
	# <THE_PATH>/setnetbootinfo -v -a <MAC_ADDR> netboot

   MAC address can be seen on screen during target self diagnostic stage.

   You now have modified copy of 'netboot' named like 'netboot.08002b3f57ff'
   Copy it into the boot servers /tftpboot/ directory.

3) Try to boot it off;

	>>> boot ez0

   Your machine should be served promptly.  If not, check bootp/tftpboot
   configuration.

   IMPORTANT fireware revision notice:

   Never use most recent v7.0 firmware.  It seems to send a broken TFTP
   request which will never be served.  I tried v6.2 (by downgrade), which
   was proven to work, but v7.0 not.

Tohru Nishimura
Nara Institute of Science and Technology