Hi.  The company I work for has an old 3000/500 that we'd like to
have NetBSD on.  Unfortunately, we seem to have difficulty getting
it bootstrapped.  This system has no floppy drive, so the only boot
method appears to be via network (we do have a CD-ROM burner if
that would help).

We've tried four version of firmware/PALcode with varying levels of
success.

* The firmware/PAL on the machine originally was ancient.  We got bad
  fcs checksums on the TFTP request (according to tcpdump).

* We loaded firmware off a CD-ROM:
	VPP PAL X5.48-82000101/0SF PAL X1.35-82000201 - Built 1-DEC-1994
	KN15-AA -V6.0-S7D2-I1DE-sV1.0 DECchip 21064 P3.0
  This allows us to actually grab and boot the bootblock, but it fails
  with:
	Loading netbsd...
	boot: boot device name does not contain ethernet address

	Boot device name was "BOOTP 0 7 0 0 0 2 CORE-IO"

	Your firmware may be too old to network boot NetBSD/alpha
	or you might have to hard code an ethernet address into
	your network boot block with setnetbootinfo(8).

* Thinking that the firmware might be too old still, we grabbed a newer
  version off DEC's ftp site:
	VPP PAL V5.56-82000101/OSF PAL V1.45-82000201 - Built 25-SEP-1996
	KN15-AA -V6.9-S87A-I212-sV1.0 [...]
  Using that, we get a similar error to the first: bad checksum on the
  TFTP request (admiral is the alpha, amana is NetBSD/sparc--the trace
  is from NetBSD/i386):
15:10:25.180739 admiral.rrinc.com.24010 > amana.rrinc.com.tftp: 27 tftp-#0 [tos 0x1] (ttl 30, id 2447, bad cksum 92fc!)
  The alpha prints:
	AUDIT_BSERVER_FOUND
	? T_ERR_NI - RECIEVE_TIMEOUT
	84 FAIL

  The corresponding tcpdump trace from the previous ("Loading netbsd...")
  boot is:
15:14:31.458121 admiral.rrinc.com.4858 > amana.rrinc.com.tftp: 27 RRQ "/boot.netbsd.alpha" (ttl 30, id 2447)

* We also tried 7.0 (the only other version we found at DEC's ftp site).
  Same result as with 6.9.

So, the 6.0 firmware looks like the best bet so far.  I tried to build
and use setnetboot(8) on the NetBSD/sparc box--changing the byte order
in a few places and adding in a couple of LLs (Kudos to Chris (I assume)
for the u_intN_ts in that code).  The program appeared to work, but I
got the same result from the boot block.  I tried using setnetbootinfo
with and without the -f option.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?  If we need another version
of the firmware, it would be nice to know where to get it, too.

If we can get this thing running, I'd like to take a little time to try
to get the Turbochannel and CXT/SFB functional.  It's the only alpha that
we have access to...

We're new to this side of the alpha...  Any information would be
appreciated.  We have scanned the mailing list archives and the FAQ,
but haven't found anything that appears directly useful except that
Tohru Nishimura says that 6.3 and 6.4 work.

Thanks,
-allen

-- 
                    Allen Briggs - briggs@ninthwonder.com