I had a 3/50 booting fine over ethernet some months ago, but I built it a
SCSI boot disk, and have been using that ever since.  Then, I tried again
recently, but with little success.

The symptoms were classic - hanging in netboot, just after establishing its
IP address.

I felt that it ought to work, since it always used to, and that the problem
was on the SS20 I am trying to boot off, so I fiddled around a bit, but
rarp appears to be on and working, tftp is obviously working, as the
netboot is tftp'd, and rpc.bootparamd does not even acknowledge any
requests (in debug mode).

There are quite a lot of le: missed packet errors - but I think the ether's
OK, since when I boot off SCSI, I can do pings with 0% loss, and also nfs
mount /usr/share with no hassles (which also proves that the SS20's nfs is
OK).  I can also nfs-mount the remote root directory when booted off SCSI,
so that's not the problem either.

So, I decided to go get the shiny new netboot 1.2 (I had been using 1.1.1.1).

The booting is much more verbose now,

>> NetBSD netboot [$Revision: 1.2a $]
Boot device type: le: Sun/Lance Ethernet
d_devbytes=4
d_dmabytes=22754
d_localbytes=0
d_stdcount=1
d_devtype=1
d_maxiobytes=0
prom_iopen: devaddr=0xffe0000 pte=0xf4000090
prom_iopen: dmaaddr=0xfff43c10
Using IP Address 205.199.253.25 = CDC7FD19
prom_iopen: succeeded, error=0
le: missed packet
boot: client addr: 205.199.253.25
le: missed packet
bootparamd: 'whoami' call failed
boot: netbsd: Input/output error
boot:

And it waits for input...

The only non-deterministic part is where the missed packets go, and how
many there are.

The IP address is correct, and unique on the network.  And it works fine on
that IP when SCSI-booting.

And, what is worse, it used to work.  I suspect rpc.bootparamd on the SS20
just now.  the SS20's /etc/bootparams entry is:

star    root=monica:/export/home/star/root,\
        swap=monica:/export/home/star/swap

The paths are correct, monica is the name of the SS20, star is the short
name of the 3/50.  The 3/50s short name is now in the SS20s hosts file,
although it wasn't at boot time, but I don't think that should matter (I
have restarted bootparamd several times).  Also, I changed the bootparams
file to have the FQDN - star.mailbox.co.uk - which is 205.199.253.25, set
up in the DNS.  I am not free to reboot the SS20 - it's a rather important
web server ;( (Well, important to my employers).

Uggg...

If it wasn't for the fact it used to work....

Any ideas, anyone

Jules