Re: dhcp/tftp boot cd?

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 10:32:21AM +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:
> Yes, works for me too. The way there was a bit bumpy though: my gdrom drive
> seems to be "ageing" and does not like all CDs I burned. Not having ever
> created a working CD before, I was a bit unsure I followed the documented
> process correctly, but after a few tries (different CDR drives) and using
> cdrecord speed=1 I finally got a working ipupload client CD.

It has been a few years since I last used NetBSD/dc, but I recall that
back then my drive too started acting strangely.  In the beginning it
was able to boot my dcload-ip CD every single time, but at some point
I had to try about 20 times or so until it finally detected my CD as
valid.  The weird thing is that I hadn't even used the drive
inbetween (in terms of accessing something on disc), it had simply
been on running NetBSD for some time (which might have been in the
range of a few months).  I really am not sure if my media was crap or
if burning the CD with lower speeds might help, but I will try it out
at some point in the (probably not too near) future.


> However (I should have noticed before) I only have a HT300 Lan Adapter, not
> the broadband adapter - so the ipupload client did not work for me.

There is a version for the HT-300, which is what I was using too.  A
quick google search turned up
  http://napalm-x.thegypsy.com/adk/dc/dcload-ip/index.html
but I am not 100% sure if that is what I was using.


> Back to plan b: I fixed a few bugs I introduced when porting dcload-ip to
> modern bfd and was able to get it working. But: it does not like to directly
> boot a modern kernel (strange failures after various sections) - probably
> it assumes something simpler. Now fixing that was easy: I used objcopy to
> create a raw binary from the kernel, and then uploaded and started that with
> dcload-ip.

Ah, yes, I seem to recall that I also had that objcopy step every time
I compiled a new kernel.  I don't think it is related in any way to
your kernel being "too new" (but then, perhaps dcload-ip would have
coped with an ELF kernel and I just never knew that and always sent
over raw kernels...).


  Harold