It doesn't work.


Ok, I suppose I should provide a bit more detail than that.  I've
recently acquired a secondhand beige G3, and I'm working on turning it
into a fileserver/application server for my home network.  Right now,
I'm trying to follow the netboot directions at
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/network/netboot/, and I've reached
the step of setting up the BOOTP server.  I'm using an existing Linux
box as the server for this.

Gentoo Linux offers two options for a bootp server: the Netkit bootp
server which is badly underdocumented, and the ISC dhcp server, which
has very little documentation on using it as a bootp server.  Neither
of them appears to support the "/etc/bootptab" file mentioned in the
netboot documentation, and the documentation doesn't mention what the
various parameters mean, so I've had to guess about translating them
into a format that the ISC server understands.  It appears I got
things wrong:

Entering "boot enet:,ofwboot.xcf" into OpenFirmware gives an error of:
  BOOTP failed
  can't OPEN: enet:,ofwboot.xcf

The bootp server on my Linux box prints

BOOTREQUEST from 00:05:02:fe:25:7e via eth0
BOOTREPLY for 192.168.0.7 to macintosh (00:05:02:fe:25:7e) via eth0

ten times.

Any suggestions?


For future reference:
The mainboard battery appears to be dead.  Will this affect my ability
to use the computer with NetBSD, or can I simply set up NTP to keep
the clock correct, and forget about it?  If not, where can I get a
replacement battery?

The computer has an ATTO ExpressPCI PSC SCSI card connected to two
hard drives.  Is this card supported under NetBSD?  If not, what's a
good, inexpensive replacement?

Thanks,
Mark Wagner