Netboot and 3Com 90x PCI packet driver (bizzare)

[Mike Hammer <mike-hammer@usa.net>]

Hello,

First off, i did get the Netboot and 3Com 90x PCI card to work
by using 3Com's packet-driver, 3c90xpd.com which came with their
two floppies.  I'm using 29C512 to burn in 32KB of bootprom code.

One thing that i noticed is this.  If i run the 3c90xpd.com from
DOS command prompt just to test the packet driver, i can just
type in the name of the program (3c90xpd.com) and no other parameters,
and the packet driver seems to find the PCI network card okay.  It
displays all the network card settings as far as MAC address, IRQ,
i/o address and the default packet driver s/w interrupt it's installed to.

Hence, with above experiment going okay without any extra arguments,
i decided to build the bootprom the same way, i.e. providing no
arguments for packet driver when Netboot asks for one.

Now, when i burn in the bootprom binary (32KB) to 29C512 and try
to boot from the network card, it seems the packet complains that
there's no arguments provided to the packet driver.  The screen displays
the help message as:

Usage: 3c90xpd [Switches] /I= /K= /S=

where: /I=packet driver software interrupt number
       /K=PCI bus number
       /S=PCI slot number

Apparently the packet driver needed these arguments (/I= /K= /S=) to
find the network card on PCI bus.  That's very odd since when i ran
the packet from DOS prompt, i didn't had to provide this arguments
for the packet driver to find the card and install itself.

Anyways, i had to rebuild the bootprom and this time give these 3
arguments when Netboot asked for them.  Now the network card boots
and i can remote boot the client.

The question is, why did running packet driver from DOS prompt
w/o providing these arguments worked, whereas including the packet to 
the Netboot doesn't work w/o these arguments?

I guess providing these arguments isn't too bad except that the PCI
slot number had to be provided (/S=) which pretty much fixes the PCI
slot in the motherboard where the network card can be plugged in.

If anyone has experience in using Netboot with 3Com 90x packet driver
and had such similar experience, i would appreciate i very much for any
feedback or comments.

PS. Just today i started getting all this off the wall postings from
    Netboot mailing-list.  About 100 or so postings came through
    the Netboot mailing-list that had nothing to do with bootprom.
    Any idea what's going on?  Each of this postings had "netboot" at
    the "To:" field of e-mail.  Are we having problem with the mailing-
    list server?

Thank you very much,

mh