Well, I got the thing net-booting last night. This was a major PITA due to 2 annoying trip-ups:
Well, hey - transcievers go bad. Especially ones taken off an HP with unknown heritage. :)
But....here's the real annying bit: Ethereal 0.8.19 (which I was using to look at what the sun was trying to do to boot) doesn't decode RARP packets properly! What I saw in the packet decode was completely wrong. The sun was sending out RARP queries for it's address ("Who is 08:00:20:01:5e:17? Tell 08:00:20:01:5e:17") and that was all fine. But, etheral claimed that my rarp server was responding by saying who it was, and not answering the question the sun had asked ("00:a0:24:b4:f4:ee is at 10.0.0.31"). Weird, huh?
Well, this had me thinking for almost 2 hours that my rarpd was screwed up! Finally, I fired up tcpdump instead of ethereal (I needed another trace and didn't feel like dealing with a GUI) and saw that rarp was, in fact, behaving i properly. Aaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggghhhhh!!!!
So, I switched to another transciever (luckily I had another one) and the thing took off like a rocket! Whew!
Now, I've gotten the sun to netboot into a full netbsd system server off my laptop via NFS. The sun 3/50 is too small to boot the RAMDISK kernel, BTW. Then, I could disklabel an external SCSI disk and dd the miniroot onto sd0b.
So, I'm currently stuck at trying to boot the miniroot. The PROM boots the netbsd 'ufsboot' just fine. Ufsboot then tried to load the kernel (netbsd) from the disk. Half way (or, at least, part way) through loading the kernel, the system hangs and I get the error message "dma never completed". Is my SCSI controller screwed up? Argh...if it's not one thing, it's the next. :(
I finally got it running and installed. I switched over to a different hard disk (perhaps a SCSI compatibility issue?) and the miniroot fired right up. The netbsd 1.4.2 installer is a bit annoying and not having a backspace is even more annoying (the latter problem is likely mine, not netbsd's). But, after 5 or so tries, I got the system installed perfectly. It's actually a pretty nice system - fairly responsive over telnet (no, Serge, I'm not going to try SSH) and runs nicely. Now I just have to get a kernel with bpf support onto it so i can run dhcpd. Something tells me I'd better learn how to cross-compile for this thing. :)