On Sun, 18 Jan 1998, Michael Sokolov wrote:

> But my second reaction is, why do you want to netboot in the first
> place?!?! You have a tape drive!!  I personally find netbooting flawed
> from the outset. Suppose that you live in a distant village in the
> former Soviet Union and your VAX is the only computer in the radius of
> two hundred kilometers. What are you going to netboot from? With a tape
> drive, on the other hand, you should be able to buy (for a small fee
> that's only for the tape, the software should be totally free) the
> bootstrap tape from the group that distributes the OS, boot from it, and
> run your solitary VAX! 

I present this alternative scenerio to defend the honour of my efforts to
consolidate the netbooting information into a unified and readily
digestible document:

Suppose you live in the outskirts of Moosejaw Canada.  It is deep winter
and a severe blizzard has just passed through leaving behind in its icey
wake more than 4ft (1.2m) of snow.  Physical access to civilization both
to and from your remote location will be impossible for more than a month
IF there are no further snowfalls. 

A day later while scavenging the forest in search of wood suitable for
heating your cabin with, you stumble across the mauled remains of a DEC
technician.  Obviously the tech's had some sort of misadventure with a
hungry grizzly bear.  Clutched in what you can only guess to be his frozen
arms is a VAXstation 3100 Model 38.  With the axe you'd been carrying to
chop wood, you hack the tech's arms off in order to free the VAX. It is a
hearty looking machine, though slightly blood-stained, which you believe
you just might be able to salvage. Still you're not sure what you could
possibly run as an OS on this serendipitous woodland booty.  Within the
hour you return to the cabin, a few logs under one arm and the VAX under
the other.

Once there you fire up your trusty 386 running NetBSD and browse around
the net over your 33.6kbps modem connection to Moosejaw Online, the
nearest ISP.  Using lynx, you hit the major search engines and discover
that NetBSD/VAX will in fact run on the VAXstation you found (well, the
technician was dead so who was to say who's VS3100 it was?)  Your first
thought is to try and get it booted from floppy, but apparently bits of
DEC tech cartilage and grizzly bear fur have gummed up the stepper motor
in the floppy drive so it is unusable. 

Haha! But that's okay because in your browsing you have discovered the
VAXstation Netbooting HOWTO on the web!  You scramble to find the junky
old WD8003 8-bit ethernet card and thinnet strand which you know are
buried in your computer scraps pile. You're lucky and find a pair of T
connectors but alas no 50ohm terminators can be found.  Argh!  Sneakily,
you eye your old transistor radio, a present you received on your 9th
birthday from your beloved father. Reflecting back, you remember how a
few days following that birthday your father fell through the ice of a
nearby lake never to be found again -- not even when the snow melted in
the spring.  Still, there's little sacred when it lay in the path of a
hacker getting a VAX running.

Within a few minutes the radio was disassembled and four common 100ohm
resistors had been extracted.  (There weren't any 50ohm resistors in the
radio.)  You carefully wire two sets of the 100ohm resistors in parallel
to create a 50ohm resistor.  Then you attach them to the ends of the T's
on the thinnet strand.

Over the next few hours you manage to configure your NetBSD/i386 system as
a bootserver by following the VAXstation Netboot HOWTO instructions.  An
hour later and you've successfully MOP loaded the mopable bootloader!  You
start your FTPing the latest NetBSD/VAX binary distribution.  Although
it'll be many hours before the binary distribution is finished
transferring to the 386, you know that complete success is close at hand. 
Besides, you've got plenty of time to kill... I mean waste. 

Excited you burst through the door of the cabin into the bitingly cold
night air.  Yelling towards the coal black heavens, "Thank goodness for
netbooting as my floppy drive was gummed up with cartilage and grizzly
bear fur!  Thank you.....!!!" <short pause> "Oh yeah, and I don't have a
tape drive!" 

On a distant ridge, a pack of wolves howl.

-brian.
---
Brian "JARAI" Chase | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ | VAXZilla LIVES!!!