In the depths of time Robin Birch is said to have spoken thus:
> Dear All,
> The install saga continues.  I am having problems reading the tar.gz files of the
> tape that I've got so, thinks I, we'll try a network install.  At this stage things
> got a little fraught.  I can't find the necessary device to ifconfig the ethernet
> port.  This VAX has an ethernet system as part of the cpu board, its called ESA0 by
> the monitor, but I don't know what it is called by gennetbsd.  In fact I'm not even
> sure that the generic kernel supports it.
> 
> Can anybody advise?.
	I'm no NetBSD/VAX guru but I can certainly try. My computer club has,
among other systems, a uVAX 3300 which is probably quite similar logically
to your 3400. Our mainboard is a KA640 V5.3, VMB 2.7 . The ethernet device
isn't currently supported by NetBSD as far as I know, nor is (apparently)
the DSSI system. To have internet access quickly, your best bet is to
buy/borrow/steal a DELQA or DEQNA card, or to use SLIP. I'm planning to
hack together a driver for the ESA over the summer vacation. The ESA
hardware is supposedly a lot like the ethernet device in the pmax. There is
apparently a 128 Kb shared memory segment in which only the top (or bottom)
word of every longword is accessable by the network device. The other 16
bits are unoccupied. You might want to check the pmax driver source
(.../arch/pmax/tc/if_le.c) for more information. I dunno where the thing
is located in memory though. Does anyone have more information on this?
> 
BTW, what's your RA90 attached to? a Qbus interface card?

Good luck.

  Erik Manders                                        erik@il.ft.hse.nl
--
:evil and rude: adj.  both {evil} and {rude}, but with the additional
   connotation that the rudeness was due to malice rather than incompetence.
   Hackish evil and rude is close to the mainstream sense of `evil'.
                                        --Jargon file, version 3.3.1 [edited]