On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:26:04 -0500, you wrote: I have looked at this first hand. We are still missing something. For some reason the ISL is unable to find what it needs to complete the process. The other thing that bothers me is how slow the whole environment responds to this. [...] One of the problems is that the InfoServer system on VMS is *not* the same as the InfoServer hardware. The documentation for the hardware platform was/is much superior to that of the software solution. I suspect that we are missing something in the software scenario that isn't even an issue in the hardware one. http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/83final/ba322_90045/apcs01.html says: InfoServer network booting is supported for OpenVMS installations and upgrades on any OpenVMS Alpha system and on any Integrity servers that support OpenVMS , and does NOT mention VAX systems. I'm just wondering if this is because the VAX architecture is no longer supported at large or because the host-based Infoserver is not able to perform ISL for VAXen. Just a speculation: ISL_SVAX sends a strange LAD/LAST request that the host-based thing is not able to understand, so the ISL sits there until a timeout is reached and an error is sent to the poor user. :-\ It would be nice to be able to sniff the initial phases of the dialog between different architecture systems and an InfoServer, just to check if there are any significant differences in the initial request packets... A final silly question: do you have actually seen any VAX installing VMS from a host-based InfoServer? I have missed this simple "detail"! :-) Thanks, G. P.S.: Excuse my English: it's not my native language and sometimes I'm very dubious about the understandability of my sentences. :-P