I realize this list is practically dead, but I'm hoping that someone who can help me out is still subscribed and lurking. I'd like to apologize in advance for being so long-winded here, but I've played the opposing roles often enough that I'd much rather give too much information than too little. If you're in a hurry, you can probably safely skip paragraph 2, 3, and 5. On with the story... I recently inherited a 17-slot 3Com/USR/CommWorks/UTStarcom/Whatever TC1000 chassis, including a HiPer NMC and some software updates that hadn't been uploaded to the cards. I've never maintained a 3Com RAS before, but I had access to a couple of other systems similar to this one, which I used to familiarize myself. After a bit of hair pulling, I finally managed to make a console cable that this system liked (the HiPer cards seem to be extremely picky about the way the flow control pins are wired.) Shortly afterwards, I had the HiPer ARC and NMC working well enough to be able to telnet to the ARC and use the TC manager with the NMC. This TC was already configured, but poorly, so my plans were to upgrade the software on all of the cards and return all of the software to the factory defaults (or as close as possible), so that I could start configuring the TC anew. Long story short, all of the DSP cards and the ARC upgraded fine, but the NMC upgrade (it had to be the NMC, of course) failed. I now get absolutely nothing on the serial console (port 1), and the NMC does nothing but sit around blinking the green Run/Fail LED after it POSTs. I've researched this a bit in hopes of finding a solution on my own, but so far I haven't really had any luck. No BIOS initialization message is sent over the serial console, so it's not unsurprising that sending AT{Z}/AT{ZF} has no effect. Several documents mention the use of PCSDL to re-flash the card, but I suspect PCSDL just issues AT{Z} and does the ZMODEM upload for the user. Even if it doesn't, the only firmware I have is a .DMF, not a combo .NAC/.SDL. I'm assuming that using PCSDL to revive this thing isn't going to work, based on the following: the NMC no longer emits ANYTHING when starting up, the firmware I have isn't in the proper format, and I can't find any information suggesting that PCSDL is usable with this NMC. I'm not 100% sure which model this NMC is, or I'd already have given more info on it. Unfortunately, I'm going by memory here, since I don't have access to the card at the moment, and I (obviously) can't poll it via SNMP. I'm *pretty* sure it's the 486 NMC (as it has a 486 PhoenixBIOS sticker on one of the chips, although not the one I think is the BIOS.) The CPU itself has a heatsink that appears to be attached with thermal epoxy, and the flash and RAM SIMMs are parallel to the DIP switches and the front of the board. If the aforementioned TC boxes are any indication of what's in this one (which was originally at the same location), the hardware revision of this NMC board is either 2.0 or 3.0, and the version of the NMC software that was being uploaded (8.6.3) should work fine. If anyone has any suggestions or ideas, I'd absolutely love to hear them. So far I haven't had much luck, and I'm hoping someone has some clues, as I'd love to get back to work on setting this thing up. The current "plan of last resort" is to take a spare NMC that we have at a moderately distant POP (which is hopefully of the same spec), use the flash SIMM on that to boot the dead NMC, swap the flash SIMMs while the card is hot, and use the in-memory firmware to re-flash the SIMM from the dead board. While this method SHOULD work, it's a terribly nasty approach that I'd prefer to avoid (not to mention the trip to fetch the other NMC, which I'm not even entirely sure is the same model.) Thanks, -- Ben Winslow <rain@bluecherry.net>