>   I believe that will cause you problems once you manage to get netboot
> loaded and running.  Netboot needs rp to nfs mount the path to the kernel
> file.

Are you sure? the 'netbsd.gz' image is the install kernel which is supposed
to be an all incompassing image.  I'm really not interested in having a
network filesystem, just something in memory so I can at least boot a
system to diagnose local disk issues.  

>   I can't see any obvious reason netboot isn't getting loaded.  One thing
> that could be done is to run tcpdump and capture all the traffic to/from
> bjork and see if it's even attempting a tftp transfer.

That was a bit revealing:

06:46:05.407504 0.0.0.0.bootpc > 255.255.255.255.bootps:  xid:0xc084af5c secs:4 file ""[|bootp]
06:46:05.424178 otaku.freeshell.org.bootps > bjork.bootpc:  xid:0xc084af5c secs:4 Y:bjork S:otaku.freeshell.org sname "otaku" file ""[|bootp]

Apparently 'file' isn't getting set somewhere.  My understanding of bootp
is that the server tells the client what file to tftp first (bootfile)
and then the client will tftp the file that is on the 'boot' srm
command line.