Yes this is relevant to the NetBSD/VAX port.  A couple months ago I was
working on netbooting from SGIs.  Everything worked great with the
exception of getting the MOP server to behave properly on the SGI.  The
problem I was running into was in getting the ec0 ethernet device on the
Indigo^2 and O2 platforms to operate in promiscuous mode.

The searched the SGI man pages and on-line manuals looking for anything
about configing the ethernet device to behave properly, but I just
couldn't find anything.
 
When I run a strings on the actual ifconfig binary, among the output text 
I get the following:

  flags
  BROADCAST  
  DEBUG  
  LOOPBACK
  POINTOPOINT
  NOTRAILERS
  RUNNING  
  NOARP   PROMISC
  ALLMULTI
  FILTMULTI
  MULTICAST
  CKSUM
 
The PROMISC and ALLMULTI are promising, but I've no idea how or if I can
set these flags using the IRIX ifconfig command.  Anyone?  I'd posed this
question to the comp.sgi newsgroups a while back and never got an answer.

-brian.
---
Brian "JARAI" Chase | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ | VAXZilla LIVES!!!