Hello everyone, At work I found an old Motorola Delta crate gathering dust. On closer inspection it contained an MVME147SA-1 SBC, an MVME332XT serial wossname and a cradle with 3 SCSI devices: a 150 MB CDC-III (wow!), an Archive 150 MB QIC tape drive and a huge 5 1/4 inch full height Micropolis drive which refused to spin up completely and just went 'clunk, clunk' softly followed by spin down and then it starts all over again. Awwww.
Powered it up, found out the battery and thus NVRAM was dead. Looked up some stuff on the web and got a replacement for the Timekeeper. After installing this and reinitialising everything I could boot into the Motorola SYSV/68 SVR3.2 OS which was sitting on the CDC-III. That looked pretty bad. None of my favourite commands installed, plus major Y2K problems :p Time to try and run Debian on the beast. Got the MVME147 specific installation notes from Richard Hirst on http://www.sleepie.demon.co.uk/linuxvme/mvme147-potato.txt and started working through them. It all worked up until actually trying to download the kernel-ramdisk combo with sboot. It starts to download fine, but after a while it just stops transferring and aborts after some retries on timeout. I never seem to get much further than a few hundred KB. The 'other side' is running RedHat 7.2. I have succesfully downloaded the kernel-ramdisk image with a TFTP client on the SYSV/68 OS. I tried using several different versions of the TFTP server but to no avail. The strange thing is, when using Ethereal on the same RedHat 7.2 box, I didn't see the TFTP retransmissions 'on the wire', however, when attaching to the TFTP server process with strace I did see a 'send()' call which seemed to succeed (it returned '516' which I think is a full TFTP data packet). After this I tried booting OpenBSD 3.1. It had similar problems trying to download a kernel+ramdisk with its sboot program, but creating a diskless setup (using bootparamd and NFS) and using its secondary netboot loader did work (netboot is quite small and is in that case the only program downloaded with TFTP, the rest is done through NFS). So, I got OpenBSD to work, but I prefer to be able to run Linux (diskless or not). Does anyone have any clue as to what is going wrong? Any help would be apreciated. Kind regards, Kars.
