Diskless Laptop PLIP interface

Hello all, thank you for taking the time to read this. I have been
trying for a few days now to setup my old 386 with 4mb of ram with linux.

I have been through a number of solutions, for example the memory is too
low to load a ramdisk, so commercial bootdisks are out of the question.
I compiled a small kernel with PPP, PLIP, IP autoconfig with DHCP and
BOOTP and put that on disk with lilo to supply boot options.

I setup my NFS server and hosts files. But still i could not get it to
run. AFter reading the NFS-HOWTO, PLIP-Install-HOWTO, nfsroot.txt (in
the kernel source package), Diskless-root-NFS-HOWTO etc etc (i'm
currently reading back issues of the Linux Gazette... :-( my eyes are
killing me)

I still can't get it to work (although i think i now have working DHCP
and BIND servers :-) Whenever the laptop boots up and tries to autoconf
its ip address it times out, same result when i tell it what ip address
to use and interface to connect on.

The options i've tried pasisng on are:

nfsroot=192.168.0.1:/ ip=autoconf
and
nfsroot=192.168.0.1:/ ip=192.168.0.2:192.168.0.1:::targetlip0:

From the timeouts i'd assume that it's a problem with the DHCP but
there's so many links in this chain which could be faulted-i'm not even
sure if the cable i'm using is a laplink/null cable...
Any ideas?

Thx