I too have a 2100A, its rackmounted. The 2100A differed from the 2100, in that 
it had a "segmented" pci bus,a different I/O module, and some other subtle 
differences in the SMP frequency timing, which so far, no one has got a handle 
on, either with netbsd or freebsd.

I was working with Andrew Gallatin, who wrote much of the original code for 
the AS2100 for Freebsd. Unfortunatly the machine was a production server 
running VMS, and I was only playing with it when replacing some disks, so I 
was not able to help find the problem. I too had tried the RH 7.2 
distribution, which crapped out on me during the install. I never got around 
to try the debian or gentoo distribution to see if they had incorporated the 
RH and HP code from the wrapper cdrom.

Interestingly, the machine installed and ran FreebSD 4.4 in uniprocessor mode 
fine. I also managed to boot a uniprocessor netbsd kernel..1.5.2 ?? or 1.6 in
all the way up to the disk recognition where it refused to recognized any scsi 
disks.

I too would like to see a bsd on these machines, The one I have has 4 275Mhz 
processors and 1 GB of memory, so it should be pretty zippy.

If you have the time and the understanding you might work with Andrew and get 
to the bottom of the problem, He just need someone to apply patches and run 
the test kernels.


Cheers


Tom

Paul Baughman wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've searched the archives and see that one or two people have NetBSD 
> running on 2100A's.  Can anyone tell me how you installed it?
> 
> I have two of these beasts and I can't find any OS installer that will 
> boot them.  They currently have no OS on them, and I don't have another 
> machine to do cross-compiles or anything like that.  I can't do any kind 
> of a network install, since I only have a dial-up connection.  Basically 
> I have a CD-Rom drive to install from and that's it.
> 
> The standard installer (I've tried 1.6) doesn't seem to boot this 
> machine, at least not for me.  Is there a non-standard install iso I can 
> download from somewhere?  Or will the 2.0 installer handle this now?
> 
> Any pointers etc, gratefully accepted.
> Thanks.
> 
> Paul Baughman
> 
> 
> -----
> Paul.
> 
> This message has been brought to you by the letter Null-A and the 
> numbers +infinity and -infinity.
> 
> 

-- 
---
Please do not read this sig. If you have read this far, please unread back to 
the beginning.