On Thu, 22 May 1997, Ole Myren R|hne wrote:

> I have tried booting NetBSD on a VS3100 over the network using the
> description found at:

...

> 1. This particular VS3100 is diskless, with some internal scsi bus
> left unconnected/unterminated. When booting, I get a some 10 minutes worth
> of messages like
> 
> ncr0 at vsbus0: scsi-id 7
> scsibus0 at ncr0: 8 targets
> ncr0: reselect, BSY stuck, bus=0xff
> ncr0: reselect, BSY stuck, bus=0xff
> ncr0: select found SCSI bus busy, resetting
> ncr0: reselect, BSY stuck, bus=0xff
> ncr0: reselect, BSY stuck, bus=0xff
> ncr0: select found SCSI bus busy, resetting

Sounds like your at least hitting the NetBSD kernel :-)  Let's see if I
can offer any useful advice...  On my particular machine, I have no SCSI
drives connected.  Just the SCSI/SCSI VS3100 controller card and I do have
the terminator in place on the external 68pin SCSI port.  I remember
getting simillar errors with the NetBSD/VS3100 kernel when I actually had
an internal SCSI HD attached.

I will do some equipment juggling tonight to see if I can't reproduce the
problems you're experiencing and offer some more concrete advice, but I do
have the following possible immediate suggestions:

1. Try booting the machine without any SCSI drives connected (it sounds
   like this is already the case for you). 

2. Make sure the external SCSI terminator is in place (I don't know if
   this is necessary).

3. Remove the SCSI controller card from the VS3100 (if it's not a
   model 76 with the integrated SCSI controller). This is sort of the
   hardware version of recompiling the kernel without SCSI support.
   Hopefully the SCSI driver will not complain if there is nothing present
   for it to complain about.  Yes, it's sort of inelegant, but it probably
   will fix the problem.

One other thing.  I do know that the VS3100s came with at least two types
of drive controllers -- a SCSI/SCSI controller and a SCSI/ST-506
controller. My VS3100 has been running with the SCSI/SCSI controller in
it.  I have not yet tried booting up NetBSD with a SCSI/ST-506 controller
in the machine so there may be some subtle differences between the two
controllers which are causing problems. I do have a SCSI/ST-506 I can use
and I will experiment with it tonight.

---

In general news, it looks like I've got at least three major things to
update the HOWTO with.  [1] more specific information on which systems and
which configurations of those systems will netboot happily, [2] new info
on the whoami problems with Linux's rpc.bootparamd server and how to get
around them, [3] a section for netboot serving from [Free|Net|Open]BSD.

-brian.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian D. Chase         Systems Coordinator        brian.chase@carpediem.com
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