"Bernhard H. Buckel" wrote:

> 
> Dear all,
> 
> after thinking for a while, reading the Ultrix manuals (dms and
> friends) and remembering the black magic I had to deal with to convert
> a VAX from a netbooted client to a standalone machine, I fear that
> you're out of luck. Without a Ultrix-machine on which you can
> customize a kernel you won't get far IMHO.

I do have an Ultrix box that the current diskless Ultrix box boots now.
To fill you in, I've recently replaced both a DECstation 5000/240 and an
old 586 pc with an AlphaPC164 as my main home server, but still want to
use the 5000/133 as a diskless X term.  Until we get an accelerated X
server, this means that the /133 has to stick with Ultrix.  In the mean
time, the /240 just loads the kernel to the /133 and does nothing else.
Since part of the justification to my wife for the alpha was a lower
power bill, I'm not winning yet :-)

> Hoping I'm wrong and interested in a solution, though...

I've played with netboot programs under NetBSD/pmax - the only thing
that comes to mind is a program similar to smallnet.ecoff that is loaded
by tftp, then proceeds to stuff the netblock and the Ultrix kernel into
the right places in memory.  I don't know if I can be bothered with this
one though ;)

Simon.