> > You got a 425e to boot? Really? I tried and it loaded the booter via
> > rbootd, but it never went further. I had a serial console on the first
> > serial port. What did I do wrong?
> 
> i did'nt have the time to play with it the last days, but i am shure it
> will be alive soon (some bootparams problem).
> you need rbootd which sends the bootloader to your apollo, bootparams
> which tells the box the location of its nfs-root and its name, rarp to do
> a reverse arp lookup so your box will know its ip.
> furthermore you need a nfs filesystem exported to your apollo and
> accessible as root (security hole).
> rbootd alone is not sufficent.

I've got a Vax here running under NetBSD, and I hope I can use nearly the
same setup to bootstrap the 425e. We'll see.

> the serial console works with the kernel i used. i found this kernel
> version somewhere on a netbsd mirror. if you are interested i may have
> a look at the ftp servers and tell you where to find this specific
> kernel.

That's exactly my problem. It never got that far, I attached a serial
console but saw nothing on it as soon as the rbootd said boot complete.

I'd be hugely interested in that kernel!

> when you set up your diskless environment you should first run rbootd
> and bootparams in debug mode "... -d" and have a tcpdump filter out
> your apollo. this gives you some kind of idea where to look for a
> mistake.

Well rbootd didn't complain, at least.

> and, don't be too impatient. even if the apollo got its kernel it
> takes a while to decompress it. i resetted my box several times before
> i actually realized that it's working :-)

Ah, that may be it. But on the Vax the bootloader has to get input from
the console to boot (you have to press return unless you setup the boot
flags correctly). So I panicked when I didn't see any console output.