RE: Difficulty with netbooting - le0: lost carrier when bringing down thenetbsd kernel

[Mike Begley <spam%hell.org@localhost>]

I'm located in Seattle.  I would totally love to pitch you some cash for a SCSI drive!  I did just remember that I may have one bin of hard disks I haven't looked at, that may have SCSI drives in them.  Heck, one or two of them might have Netbsd 2.something installed already!  I still need to dig up an enclosure and cabling; somehow I've misplaced all that in the last quarter century.  If you would be willing to stuff a bootable netbsd on one that would be awesome as it would side-step this whole operation, although I'm stubbornly wanting to get netbooting working now.  If only to rewrite the docs so others can follow the path using modern stuff.

And yeah, hell.org doesn't have anything on it at all.  I have an internal page that acts as my rss-link home page, but I never got that code good enough to make public.  Someday?

I was going down an unnecessary rathole with tftp; sometime in the next few weeks I'll try to get nfs running using the AUI port and see if things just work.  It would be nice to figure out the thinnet stuff, if only to provide netbooting capabilities for the stack of 340s hiding in the back closet...  😊

Thanks for all y'all's assistance so far; I'll try what's been suggested so far and see how it goes.

-mike

-----Original Message-----
From: port-hp300-owner%NetBSD.org@localhost <port-hp300-owner%NetBSD.org@localhost> On Behalf Of Mouse
Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2025 6:42 AM
To: port-hp300%NetBSD.org@localhost
Subject: Re: Difficulty with netbooting - le0: lost carrier when bringing down thenetbsd kernel

> But I've long lost my boot drives of yesteryear, and I can't find 
> anything S$

Where are you geographically?  It's a long shot, but, if you're near me, well, I still have numerous SCSI disks and wouldn't mind donating a couple to the cause.  (I tried checking www.hell.org in case it said something useful, but all I got was a redirect to HTTPS, which I would have to find a work machine to use.)

> I see that you say that the kernel is delivered via nfs.  Does that 
> mean the$

It depends.

Depending on the hardware - or more precisely the firmware - there may or may not be.  Suns, to cite an example I know better, use reverse ARP to get an address and then TFTP a file named based on that address; that file's code controls what further happens.  Assuming the text

> The bootstrap sequense is:

> - the firmware uses rbootd protocol to load a bootloader from a server
> - the bootloader uses BOOTP/DHCP to get IP addresses of server and 
> client
> - the bootloader also tries to mount servers directory using NFS
> - the bootloader loads the specified kernel from the NFS server

is accurate (I don't know - if I ever netbooted an hp300, it was long enough ago I don't recall details, and even if I did they would have been for decades-ago NetBSD), then, once rbootd finishes, whatever else happens is up to the bootloader.

One thing I've found very useful when diagnosing netboot issues is to just snoop the network for packets to/from the subject host's MAC address.  When it gets stuck, typically, the last few packets will point you towards what you need to fix or setup next.

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