Tonight I found that multia's cannot be netbooted over their thinnet port,
at least not if they are using netboot executables generated by Roland's
nifty CGI webpage.

Everything works fine up to the point where netboot runs, and then no further
packets are seen by tcpdump on the multia's thinnet. The multia console
messages get to the point where it says it is using a hardcoded ethernet
address and then it stops cold for a while, finally belching something about
net_open: BOOTP failed. Then it moves on to the next kernel name mutation and
tries again.

The minute I use a hub to put the multia on its twisted pair port, netboot
starts working fine and the multia boots up perfectly.

Is it possible to TFTP load the kernel itself instead of 'netboot' ?
SRM EWA0 seems to do fine on the thinnet port, and I boot ramdisk kernels
anyway so NFS is not being used for anything besides the kernel loads.

(BTW this is all part of my project to supply computer terminals for the
registration counter at Anime Expo -- http://www.anime-expo.org --
pictures for the NetBSD gallery will probably appear sometime in July.)

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com