On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Blaz Antonic wrote:

> I set vax/installation/netboot/boot as MOP image as instructed by
> Install-Notes. When i do b esa0 it contacts MOP daemon (i ran it in
> debugging mode), after initial broadcasts to network starts downloading
> the image, runs it (?) and crashes with
>
> ?SCB2NDINT, ESA0
> ?06 HLT INST
>    PC = 00000C66
>
> back to chevrons. Am i missing something obvious (RTFM) here ? :-) As i
> said already MOP works fine for Linux/VAX kernel so this really puzzles
> me. I haven't tried obtaining another copy of mopd sources and compiling
> them, due to lack of HD space on Linux box.

It turns out that the mop loadable bootloader image shipped with 1.6
hasn't been converted properly to the mop format.  People have been
successfully using the one from the 1.5.3 release instead:
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.5.3/vax/installation/netboot/boot.mop

> I also have a related question: when this ~64 KB boot file loads i am
> supposed to load the kernel somehow: "The kernel to load is the same
> kernel as the bootfs uses and can be found in
> .../NetBSD-1.6/vax/installation/netboot/netbsd.ram.gz", quoted from
> Install-Notes. Needless to say that file doesn't exist .. but there are
> install.ram.gz and 2 more in that directory. So assuming vax loaded boot
> file successfully, what do i do with those kernel images?

You'll need to put the netbsd kernel image at the top of your NFS
exported root filesystem for the VS3100.  By default, the bootloader
looks for the kernel using a couple of different standard names one it
NFS mounts its "/" from your Linux NFS server. If you name the kernel
`netbsd', you'll be fine.  The last time I checked, many releases of
RedHat ago, that distro didn't handle NFSv3 mount requests properly.

There are a couple of supplementary docs which explain netbooting in
a bit more detail, though some of the specifics have changed.
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/network/netboot/

And the very dated, mostly irrelevant, VAX netbooting HOWTO.
It does walk through the process of setting up a filesystem to be
exported to your client.
http://world.std.com/~bdc/projects/vaxen/VAX-netboot-HOWTO.html

-brian.