hello all,
so, for some reason, i found myself on a ds5k260 running 1.4.2 recently.
for some other reason, i was compiling stuff like ssh on it
last night, which caused me to for other reasons, invoke the 'file' 
command to check out a few binaries. I was quite surprised to find that
it reported all the binaries i tried it on, including the kernel, as 
_big_endian mips binaries, and naturally informed me that i had a file 
with invalid byte order... thinking it odd, i copied a file to an alpha 
(also running netbsd), and it told me the same thing. then, i sent it on 
to a freebsd/i386 box, where their flavor of find (well, its database) 
decided it was little-endian after all.. 
Now, this would just be a problem with the database file reads, except that
what got me onto this in the first place was that ld was complaining 
about linking PIC files with non-PIC files.. 
So, even if this has been fixed in more recent versions, it seems like 
something is funny with magic numbers or headers perhaps.. 1.4.2 being 
sort of old now, does anyone have any memories of dealing with an issue 
like this in the past, and if so, what kind of problems and what kind of 
treatments were encountered? is it merely an issue stemming from it being 
an r4400 as opposed to r3000? 

happy hacking,
isildur



On Thu, 1 May 2003, Simon Burge wrote:

> "Debros, Frederic M.,Md" wrote:
> 
> > on a linux suse 8.0 machine, i'm trying hard, but it stops somewhere before
> > ecoff....any easy howto? i must have something wrong in the path of tftp or
> > bootp.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand your question.  You've got your suse box as
> the TFTP server, and your decstation can't find the image when it tries
> to boot?
> 
> I use dhcp instead of bootp, and have an entry like:
> 
> 	host pmax {
> 		hardware ethernet       08:00:2b:2f:d5:58;
> 		fixed-address           pmax;
> 		server-name             "myserver";
> 		filename                "pmax.root/netbsd";
> 		option  root-path       "/tftpboot/pmax.root";
> 	}
> 
> Then I just boot the decstation with
> 
> 	boot 3/tftp
> 
> I think the "INSTALL.txt" file in the release notes documents this (eg
> ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.6.1/pmax/INSTALL.txt).
> 
> Simon.
> --
> Simon Burge                            <simonb@wasabisystems.com>
> NetBSD Support and Service:         http://www.wasabisystems.com/
>