On 10/6/05, Dustin Smous <dsmous@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Ok, Booting goes good until it gets to nfs_boot:
> trying DHCP/BOOTP.  I've used Ethereal to see what is
> going on, and the last packet sent is an NFS Read
> Reply from loading the kernel.  My thought is that I
> can't run MAKEDEV on my host system (Red Hat FC3).  Is
> this the case??  Has anyone else had this problem??
> I've had it up and running before, after having the
> same problem, but for the life of me, I can't figure
> out what I did to fix it...
>
> Running a NeXTstation with 20MB ram...
>
> Dustin Smous
>

As Darrin mentioned, you're not at the point of worrying about MAKEDEV yet.

What appears to be happening is that the bootloader is unable to get
the address of the NFS server.  Once it does, it loads the kernel over
NFS -- your machine has not loaded the kernel yet.  When the kernel is
loaded, the screen will turn to white text on black, with a SUN font.

If your NFS/tftp server (they really need to be the same machine) is a
different machine than your dhcp server, you need to specify that with
the "next-server" setting; see dhcpd.conf(5) for more info.  If you
aren't running the ISC dhcpd (shipped with most *NIX OSes), you'll
need to look up the appropriate documentation for your dhcp server.=20
Here's the relevant section of my dhcpd.conf:
=3D=3D=3D

host denethor {
  hardware ethernet 00:00:0f:01:28:7e;
  fixed-address 172.17.17.103;
  option host-name "denethor";
  option tftp-server-name "argonath";

  next-server argonath;         # tftp/nfs server
  filename "boot";              # which file in /tftpboot to boot
  option root-path "/usr/local/next_root";      # NFS root
  always-reply-rfc1048 false;   # required for next68k
}

=3D=3D=3D
Obviously you'll need to change the MAC address, assigned IP address
(make it something in your subnet, but not in the automatically
assigned range, if you have one), root-path, etc.  In my case,
"denethor" is my NeXT and "argonath" is my tftp/nfs server (argonath
is in the /etc/hosts file on my dhcp server; if it wasn't I'd specify
its IP address instead).

It wouldn't hurt to read through the Diskless NetBSD howto (especially
the next68k-specific parts), from
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/network/netboot/ .

I also had to use 'arp -s ....' on my tftp/nfs server to add my NeXT's
MAC to the arp table to get it to boot.  Also, for some reason the
first ben() attempt always fails on my NeXT, but the second works.=20
You wouldn't be getting to the point you're at if these were problems,
though.

Hope some of this is helpful.

Andrew