Hi, I am new to this list.
I am trying to netboot netbsd on my Indigo2.

I have various machines netbooting from a central server, so I know
netbooting works OK (though the other machines boot OpenBSD).

NetBSD/sgimips starts loading the kernel, I can see a number of devices
being detected scroll by, but then it "hangs":

First the bottom third of the screen is filled with a black rectangle
(from the left corner of the screen to about the right corner of SGI's
console window), then a little later the second third goes black this
way, and after a while the machine reboots.

I tried both NetBSD 1.6 and 1.6.1 kernels for INDY, both ECOFF and ELF,
_INSTALL and _GENERIC, and the netbsd.ip22 boot file. I also tried
snapshots of June 15th. They all show this behaviour.

The machine is a purple INDIGO2, with no drives (no sleds). That's why
I want to netboot it...

>> hinv
              System: IP22
           Processor: 250 Mhz R4400, with FPU
Primary I-cache size: 16 Kbytes
Primary D-cache size: 16 Kbytes
Secondary cache size: 2048 Kbytes
         Memory size: 128 Mbytes
            Graphics: MG10 Impact
               Audio: Iris Audio Processor: version A2 revision 1.1.0   

>> version
PROM Monitor SGI Version 5.3 Rev E IP22 Sep 28, 1995 (BE)

What I try to boot is an extracted diskless.tgz from the
installation/netboot directory on the FTP server, with gunzipped kernels
from the kernels directory (Just in case I'm doing this the wrong way).

The netboot host runs NetBSD 1.6.1/sparc and has rarpd, bootparamd and
mountd/nfsd running (no dhcpd). I can see the kernel being downloaded
succesfully in it's logs.

The boot command is:
>> boot -f bootp()/NetBSD/netboot.ip22/netbsd_INDY_INSTALL


PS:
I also tried to netboot Irix, but apart from not being able to mount
the CD's, I was told that the host needs to run Irix as well as it runs
executables on the host system (using rsh) and it can't do NFS (last CD
in the installation). Is this true?

-- 

Alban Hertroys                              http://solfertje.student.utwente.nl
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
                      Install a BSD and become religious.