Testing Diskless Remote Boot LANstations

Ethernet

Over the last few months we have had several diskless LANstations returned reporting network hardware initialisation problems.

When such a system is booted up WITHOUT the On Board Ethernet connected to a correctly terminated network the error message "Error initialising network hardware - timeout on 82592 command" may be displayed instead of "Error finding server" as expected.

This is due to noise/pickup on the unterminated or incorrectly terminated BNC connector being decoded as a valid collision. An active "collision detected" signal is applied to the On Board Ethernet and initialisation failure occurs. System functionality is NOT however affected when booted to a correctly terminated network.

This error has been incorrectly interpreted by some dealers as a hard system fault and a DOA requested. Could you therefore please make sure that when you test diskless LANstations that you first connect them to a properly terminated network.

Token Ring

It has also been noticed that the switch on Rev F LANstation motherboards that selects either Ethernet or Token Ring has been switched the wrong way in some machines.

This switch is labelled SW1, and is located to the right of the ROM BIOS chips if viewed from the front of the machine. The switch should be switched to the right for Token Ring boot and to the left for Ethernet boot.

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