Lo and Behold, Thomas Mainka said:
> 
> We have several of those digital DNARD boxes (I think you call them SHARK)
> here and are trying to make use of them. I have set up a BOOTP/DHCP-Server
> and an NFS-Server for these boxes and it works quite well. However, when I
> boot a NetBSD1.4-Kernel the system crashes while booting. Looks like it does
> not like the old firmware of these boxes (August 1997).

  Correct.  There's a bug in the old firmware which incorrectly
reports the ethernet device.  It's been fixed in the 1998 firmware
revisions.  I'm not sure what the licensing conditions are on the
DNARD firmware currently;  you might want to ping Chris Demetriou and
see.

> When I boot an older Kernel (1.3.2) the Kernel loads, but hangs when it
> tries to mount "^C" from the server as swap filesystem. How do I tell the
> kernel which NFS-Server and/or directory to use for swap/root? Is there a
> way to configure this through DHCP/BOOTP? I'd like to have the configuration
> in my DHCP-Server so that only authorized (read: root) personnel can change
> it.

  With the DEC-provided NetBSD kernels, you can supply it using the
swap-server and extensions-path options, like:

   option extensions-path "foo:/dnard/swap.%s"

(which would expand to swap.IP-address-of-dnard).

  NetBSD 1.4 does not (afaik) support supplying the swap path via
DHCP.  For our cluster, I simply hacked around it in /etc/rc by
mounting the NFS partition after boot, and then swapon'ing it.  There
are some problems which you can run in to this way (really heavy
swapping can cause the network to run out of buffers, so you get
wedged) but it works pretty well for our purposes.

   -Dave
--
work: danderse@cs.utah.edu                     me:  angio@pobox.com
      University of Utah                            http://www.angio.net/
      Computer Science - Flux Research Group   "What's footnote FIVE?"