On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, Chris Tribo wrote:

>     Ah, I didn't know there were problems with MOP'ing machines as well. I
> imagine the machines that don't tftp well are the same machines that don't
> mop well. 

 I don't think so.  I believe MOP support was there since day one of DEC's
netbooting -- they invented the protocol anyway.  BOOTP/TFTP support was
added later, when DEC discovered there is TCP/IP and not all people are
actually very fond of DECnet. ;-)  That's why it's mostly undocumented --
this was a new functionality and it was probably experimental in older
firmware.  I suspect some versions of the code might even contain stubs
only -- the unaligned memory access exception I'm reliably getting on
V5.1b is surely a sign the code wasn't even run once before being
released: 

>>boot 3/tftp
???
? PC:  0x80021fe4<vtr=NRML>
? CR:  0x30000010<CE=3,EXC=AdEL>
? SR:  0x30080000<CU1,CU0,CM,IPL=8>
? VA:  0xa000ef3a

 And my DEFZA doesn't even know of anything like TFTP:

>>boot 2/tftp
?DEV: 2/tftp

 On the other hand, "boot 3/mop" works nicely as would probably "boot
2/mop" if I had another FDDI adapter I could attach my DEFZA to (now it
only flashes the red LED and complains of the medium failure). 
 
>     Is the trouble with MOP in mopd itself, or the boot.sys mop image file
> (in this case, the lack thereof) in that it can't read .ecoff kernels? I
> know next to nothing about programming. Maybe...

 Mopd is broken, as I wrote in the other mail.  Actually MOP is such a
trivial protocol, mopd can easily be taught of any reasonable binary
format -- one can even utilize the BFD library for this purpose to achieve
full portability.  Anyway, I believe adding ELF support is easy and does
not need involving such a complexity as BFD, yet it retains necessary
portability.  Everyone uses ELF these days, right?

-- 
+  Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland   +
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
+        e-mail: macro@ds2.pg.gda.pl, PGP key available        +