NWS netbooting

["Boyanich, Alastair" <Alastair.Boyanich%au.fujitsu.com@localhost>]

G'day,

I thought I'd send some mail here in case anyone is watching other than
the crickets. I've recently stumbled upon an NWS in quite serviceable
condition given that it's new old stock and was still boxed.

Right. So, home, wired up. Grabbed an ISO and the NetBSD images and have
attempted to get it to come up.

Firstly, it has booted twice. Despite letting it sit there and crap out
with the kernel it will eventually decide that it is not a cooked
compression format if I crunch it with "compress -f -b9 netbsd" under
IRIX.

So.. despite there being lots of failed attempts and CRC errors, it will
eventually think it's okay (even though I haven't changed the file
contents!) and do "something" that gives me a black screen. Good? Bad?
Unknown.

The errors vomited whilst it attempts to bag the kernel off NFS  is:

[..snip!..]
NS0500 Search for a Host System...
NS1480 Searching for IP address:
NS0930 Attempting to use DHCP ...... successful
NS0640 Using subnet mask 255.255.255.0
NS0502 Boot Host IP Address: 10.0.0.25 ... successful
NS0510 System 10.0.0.25 contacted
NS0520 Requesting startup information...
NS0530 Loading startup information...

NS0560 File: '/export/nfs/ibmnws/netbsd.63Z'
NS0910 Attempting to use NFS protocol
   3512KB transferred
NS1030 Decompressing file...

NS1040 Error during decompression, error = 2.
[..snip!..]

It loops here.

In lieu of an install guide (I looked in the netbsd archives back to 1.2
and turned up a blank ..anyone know where there is one?) .. does anyone
know what to do now or what this thing is doing currently?

Thanks in advance :)

Al.