I searched the archives and Dejanews for info on this to no avail, and
thought that others may have a similar problem.  Apologies if this is
old news.  (I'm not on the macppc list but am on some other NetBSD
lists.)

I have an Mac 8500 on loan with the earliest OpenFirmware rev (1.0.5, I
think).  It has a 1Gb drive on which I promptly installed NetBSD 1.4.2
via FTP (and a floppy).  I let NetBSD take over the whole drive, not
having any immediate need for MacOS.

I don't have a spare monitor to plug into the 8500, nor room for one.
So I wanted to configure it to boot and run headless with a serial
console and on the net.  I had no problems installing NetBSD and then
setting OF to boot "scsi-int/sd0:0", and it runs just fine.

The problem is that immediately upon powerup, and only after powerup,
the Mac attempts to boot off of the SCSI drive but the drive
hasn't spun up yet and isn't responding.  So of course the boot hangs
instead of waiting a bit and then trying again.

It's a pain to plug in a keyboard just to give it the three-fingered
salute and get it to boot properly, not to mention makes it somewhat
useless after a power-out.  I also didn't want to install MacOS and try
to install the latest Apple firmware update in the off-chance they had
fixed the problem.

My solution is to use "nvedit" to add a delay to the end of the nvramrc
script.  (nvedit throws you into a one-line-window emacs-mode editor -
type ^C to exit.)  I simply added "3000 ms" at the end of the script
(although it should work fine at the beginning too), ran "nvstore" to
save it, and now the startup is delayed just long enough for the disk to
spin up before it boots NetBSD.

No keyboard or monitor or MacOS needed.  Should make an nice server.


	-- Parag Patel