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From: hdtodd@eagle.wesleyan.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Boot hangs on diskless 2500's resolved
Message-ID: <1991Apr21.122941.41993@eagle.wesleyan.edu>
Date: 21 Apr 91 17:29:40 GMT
Organization: Wesleyan University
Lines: 20


	This is a quick followup to my posting of last week regarding problems
booting diskless 2500's over TCP/IP through a bridge.

	We thought we'd found that the server 2500 put out packets every
2.5msec; the bridge passed them through every 3.5msec; the bridge dropped
packets occasionally; the boot protocol is not sufficiently robust for the
diskless node to recover from the dropped packets.

	We replaced the 8KB-buffer WD8003's in the PCBRIDGE bridge (an AT&T
6300 running the public-domain PCBRIDGE program) with WD8003EB's with 32KB
buffers: the diskless systems now boot smoothly.  Of course there is a
performance hit relative to having directly-wired machines with no bridge, but
the performance is quite satisfactory.

	This might help others who run into similar problems with diskless
systems. 

							David Todd
							Wesleyan University