Bell + Howell IDB 2000

Hi folks, I recently aquired a Bell and Howell IDB 2000 system with three workstations. The boot/data CDROMs (9) came with it. It seems that it is an early network computing system. The computing power is in the workstations, but they do not have any drives. They have to boot from the fileserver. The fileserver starts up but the workstations won't boot. I hooked up a laptop with a sniffer software into the Bell and Howell network (standard Ethernet). The workstation sends a kind of request (propietary, not even TCP/IP) but does not get a reply. I hooked up a serial terminal to the console of the server and got a menu system. The interesting menus (system administration, configuration etc.) are protected with a password. The password has to be standard because the server boots from a pressed cdrom. Does anybody have expieriences with these computers? p.s. One of the worksations has the label Siemens EPC 2000, but looks the same as the Bell + Howell. best regards Flori