djc@csun.UUCP (Dave Crawford) (08/03/88)
I'm helping to install a student PC-LAN laboratory at a
university in Southern California. I've run into problems, and I
hope that someone on the net can shed some light on them.
We plan to run Novell Advanced Netware 2.0A on ethernet, and we
wanted to use 'Remote Reset' boot PROMs so that the PC clones in
the lab would boot from the server (they are dual-floppy
machines, and we're tired of managing the distribution of
floppies). Our purchasing department sent the order out for bid,
and the bid was awarded to a company that supplied us with
ethernet boards by Tiara (LANCARD/E) and boot PROMs from a
company called Vitek. The Tiara boards seem to work fine, but we
can't get the remote reset feature to work.
When I called Vitek, they informed me that the PROMs were
intended for Novell NE1000 boards, and that I could make the
Tiara boards emulate the NE1000 by disabling DMA (and downloading
the proper Netware drivers from their bulletin board). Sure
enough, with DMA disabled the Tiara boards worked with the NE1000
driver, but remote reset still didn't work.
Has anyone else out there tried using remote reset with Tiara
ethernet boards? The people at Vitek implied that they had never
tried such a thing themselves, but that the NE1000 PROMs 'should
work.'
Admittedly there are other variables involved. The failure
symptoms are different depending on what kind of PC I use. (With
an XT clone, the system hangs without any screen message. With
an AT clone, I get a Novell copyright message followed by the
words 'paging error.' And my experiments sometimes crash the
server with the message 'Abend: General Protection Interrupt.')
I'd be delighted to read about anyone else's experiences with
these products.
Dave Crawford
djc@csun.edu