Thanks all for your help. What a great introduction to the community. Upgclient is apparently not going to cut it under Suse 10.1-- it croaks after finding the unit, as documented elsewhere, and no fiddling w/ the TTY settings seems to help. It appears to be time to dig out Old Flakey the spare laptop and try to find a win98 (shudder) CD.

Before my first post, I spent Tuesday evening trying to use upgrader to install disk builder. Mark's post above caused me to question why I was able to ping the empeg even after a kernel panic. Answer: DNS conflict. FYI, upgrader will not successfully install bigdisk builder onto a Snom 300 VOIP phone.