ethernet device booting problem

[KS kais]

Hello,

I installed grub 0.5.95 on Linux to boot from an Ethernet device for a
diskless linux client. Since I have no boot prom jet, I simulate from floppy
disk.

This is very likely no bug that I found, but I urgently need help, to get my
NIC running with grub. In case you can't help, are there other mailing lists
or alike? I have been working 2 days on this now and have been reading all
docs you provide.

Please pardon me if I describe my problem shortly. Of course I could attach
more details if this is the right place to ask this sort of questions.

Using SuSE 7.0 on modern PC Is unTARed 0.5.95
$ ./configure --enable-netdevice --enable-other-test-options
$ make; make check; make install
I built the files stage1 and stage2, without any problems and wrote them on
floppy:
$ cat stage1 stage1 > /dev/fd0
With (make clean, make distclean before) I tried this several times for 3
different ethernet cards (2x 3Com and 1x NE2000 RTL8029 clone, all PCI)
using --enable-XXX and other options I found in Readme.netboot.

All floppies boot and show the grub prompt and I can type "help". But if I
type "bootp" grub hangs or fails in the Probing phase. Of course the NIC and
the floppy match. I have the impression, that no UDP packet is sent on the
ethernet. My bootp-server log shows nothing. The server part is probably
correct. If I boot my client(s) normally without grub (on linux) "bootptest
serverIP" succeeds using the same NIC.

How can I go on? Any help is very much appreciated.
Thank you

Kai Schmidt (from Stuttgart/Germany)