juber@uceng.UC.EDU (james uber) (05/04/91)
If you've recently had problems with booting diskless 400 nodes over an ethernet you may want to read on. A 400dl we recently purchased would not boot properly from any other 400 series partner on our rather simple ethernet segment. All our nodes are connected directly to the backbone with transciever/transciever cable. There was a decent amount of traffic on our segment, and the 400dl would find its partner and get a random amount of the way through loading the operating system and then hang. The only message was "FFFFFFFF bad rcv status." This problem was temporarily solved by turning off our bridge and thus quieting our network segment - then the 400dl would boot just fine. We've been told that this is a known problem that has been fixed in the May 1991 patch tape (due to be released this next Friday?). The problem is a bad netboot program. jim uber juber@uceng.uc.edu