Hi !

> What I'd really like is to netboot this beast and have it mount its root
> filesystem over NFS.  I've got a NetBSD/x86 system that I want to be the
> server.  It dishes up the boot.mop file fine.  Then I grab the kernel from
> kern.tgz in the 1.4 distribution.  But it finds the DHCP server running on
> a Linux box instead of the BOOTP server running on NetBSD/x86.  So I tried
> using the DHCP server anyway and everything works but the actual NFS
> mount.
> 
> Here's an excerpt from my dhcpd.conf:
> 
> 	host hephaistos
> 	{
> 	  hardware ethernet 08:00:2b:03:8a:eb;
> 	  fixed-address hephaistos;
> 	  filename "/tftpboot/netbsd";
> 	  option host-name "hephaistos";
> 	  option root-path "/export/vax/root";
> 	}

hephaistos ? This is my DECstation 5000/25 :-)

Here is my example for multiple VAXen, dhcpd.conf on zeus, the Linux
server.

   use-host-decl-names on;
(so i don't need to type "option host-name..." in every host)

   group
   {
      filename "netbsd"; next-server hephaistos;

      host aphrodite { hardware ethernet 08:00:2B:03:B6:1E; # DELQA
         fixed-address aphrodite; option root-path "/usr/export/aphrodite"; }
      host athene { hardware ethernet 08:00:2B:23:53:CA;
         fixed-address athene; option root-path "/usr/export/athene"; }
   }

This is not with all the options i use in my network, but the most
important. filename must only be declared once for a group of hosts,
next-server is the NFS server the filesystem and bootfile are on, and in
this case for aphrodite (the VAX 4000/300) is at
/usr/export/aphrodite/netbsd on host hephaistos (DECstation running
NetBSD)

This works find, but only with a modification to the NetBSD booter, either
dhcpd, linux or NetBSD has a UDP checksum bug, so DHCP replies will fall
through the booter because of "bad" checksum. I'll check it out, what's
going wrong. If you get DHCP running from a NetBSD installation, please
infor me, then Linux has a bug, not the booter :-)

> 	nfs_boot: mountd ':/export/vax/root', error=13
> 	no file system for qe0
> 	cannot mount root, error = 79

double-check your paths, if you're interested, i can send you my whole
dhcpd.conf, so you can just replace the paths, addresses and hostnames and
check it this way. And have a look at /var/log/messages, what dhcpd tells
you about it's work. 4 packets should be transmitted:

DHCPDISCOVER from client
DHCPOFFER from server
DHCPREQUEST from client
DHCPACK from server

so long.. Michael