First experience with Netboot 0.6.0 remote booting

[George Shin <gshin@ix.netcom.com>]

Hello,

I'm currently trying out the Netboot 0.6.0 by first building
the bootprom utility, "mknbi-dos" using precompiled kernel
binaries (i'm using standard kernel).  I was able to successfully
do the "./configure" but when doing "make dep" (from ~/netboot),
i ran into some errors (i haven't had the chance to analyze this).
Thus, i skipped "make dep" and directly went to "make".  This
successfully completed and there was "mknbi" under
"~/netboot/mknbi-dos" directory.

I then tried to create the boot image file from the /dev/fd0
but i kept getting the error message, "/dev/fd0: not a file or
directory".  I don't know what's going on here.  Thus i mounted
/dev/fd0 to a Linux directory and applied "mknbi" to that
directory and i was able to generate the boot image file.

At the client side, i'm using NE2000 compatible card and the
card's install disk had its own packet driver.  Thus, i selected
that packet driver during "make bootrom" and gave the command
line option of "-i 0x62" which says to use software interrupt 0x62.

Finally i've burned the prom's to all 4 PC's we have in the
class lab and tried to remote boot.  Currently we are getting
the error, "PKTDRV ERROR: Invalid PKTDRVR".  The packet driver
successfully detected the network card though.  Is there known
compatibility between Netboot and vendor provided packet drivers?
I've contacted the vendor and they state that their packet driver
is based on Packet Driver Spec. v1.06 and this seems to be the
valid specification to date.  Then i switched over to Netboot's
own NE2000 version and this problem with packet driver went
away and i was able to boot one PC successfully.  Anyone ran
into this?

Finally it seems booting all 4 PC's at the same time results
in two PC's successfully booting and two other getting BOOTP
timeout.  I've looked at the module, "bootp.c" and it seems
the timeout is done via count to 32.  Is there a way to adjust
the timeout in BOOTP and TFTP without having to rebuild the
bootprom kernel (how about infinite wait)?  We would much prefer
using the precompiled binaries for now.

Thank you very much,

-gshin