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Date:      Tue, 22 Jan 2002 09:38:37 -0500 (EST)
From:      Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu>
To:        Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org>
Cc:        alpha@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Is anybody actually able to netboot at the moment?
Message-ID:  <15437.31085.698208.990497@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20020122114634.A907B39F1@overcee.wemm.org>
References:  <20020122114634.A907B39F1@overcee.wemm.org>

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Peter Wemm writes:
 > By netboot, I mean having something like ewa0_protocols = BOOTP and
 > 'boot ewa0' (or ewb0 in some of my cases).. ?
 > 
 > And if so, how are you doing it?  I've been fighting with a group of
 > cranky PWS 500au's (MIATAs) on a (fairly high powered) switch.
 > 
 > If I run a tcpdump on the machine running dhcpd, I see about (maybe) one in
 > 50 broadcast bootp (or dhcp discover) packets actually arriving. However,
 > when net_open() switches to RARP, I see every single one of those arrive.
 > Sometimes even SRM fails to have its bootp broadcasts seen and has to
 > retry.  Most of the times when the server actually sees the query and
 > replies, the reply isn't seen by the client.  However, the tftp downloads
 > and rarp/arp broadcasts seem 100% reliable.
 > 
 > Eventually, if I am lucky, the client will actually get a response to the
 > packets it sends and will magically snap into life, and fire up the NFS
 > root mount etc.
 > 
 > The only holdup seems to be the dhcp query.. :-(

<..>

I seem to remember finding a problem in libstand quite some time ago,
but never having time to track it down.  I think that it had to do
with checksum calculations for recv'ed packets.  Try turning off UDP
checksums on the dhcp server & see if that improves matters.

 > Anyway.. the final straw is that when it finally does get up to a loader
 > 'ok' prompt, doing a "load kernel" causes a 'kernel stack not valid'
 > trap back to SRM. (doh!)

That's a new one!  Does it actually start loading the kernel?  (as
verified by tcpdump)

Doug sent me a patch which helps to debug loader crashes last year.
I posted it to the list & its archived here:

http://docs.FreeBSD.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=18451+0+archive/2001/freebsd-alpha/20010603.freebsd-alpha

 > Can anybody please sanity check this for me?  On several different
 > combinations of hardware if possible.

Unfortunately, I'm no longer in a position to play with this...  I
wish you'd been interested a year ago :-(

Drew


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