On Mar 21, 10:07, MTPro(a)aol.com wrote: it is connected to a live (but very small!) network. >> like a little metal cap that fits on the coaxial connector? Yes, it looks just like a BNC plug with either a metal or plastic cap. In fact, I have a couple that have been made by soldering a 1/4 watt 50-ohm resistor into an ordinary 50-ohm BNC plug (BNC connectors come in two types: those with a characteristic impedance of 50 ohms, used for test equipment, thin Ethernet, etc; and those with a characteristic impedance of 75 ohms, mostly used for TV and video signals). terminator stop this? Can I bypass it looking for a host? I don't think this is going to be solved by fitting a terminator, though it may help a little (by improving the timing!). What you need to do is find out what it's trying to do that it needs to find a NIS server. Most likely it's trying to look up a machine name, possibly to mount a remote filesystem. Now I haven't had my NeXT very long, so I'm not sure if the relevant files are quite the same as on the Unix systems I'm more familiar with, and it's not here to check. But I'd look at the file "/etc/resolv.conf" and see if there's a line that looks a bit like "hostresorder nis files" or "hostresorder nis local" -- if there is, change it to "hostresorder local bind" (or anything to remove the "nis"). That line tells the network software how to look up name-to-address mappings ("host resolution order"). the possible options are NIS (Network Information Service), "local" (a local file containing mappings, called "/etc/hosts"), and BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon, which is what DNS servers use). Changing hostresorder will redirect the lookups, and the system may just stop trying. The real solution, though, is to prevent those lookups that aren't going to work. If the reason for the lookup is to mount a filesystem from a remote server's disk(s), the place to look (on a Unix system, at least) would be /etc/fstab. Remote filesystems are identifiable as type NFS or by having a server name and a colon ':' prefixing the filesystem name. Comment those out by prefixing the line with a hash symbol. and a 350mb hard drive. I have given it the command to boot from the hard drive "bsd -s" and it seems that it begins too by displaying "boot sd (0,0,0) -s", but then it has an exception error: appreciate all of the help. Possibly not. sd(0,0,0) may not be the correct partition to boot from -- what does the working one do? The numbers are the controller, drive ID, and partition (section) of the drive to load. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager Dept. of Computer Science University of York