I'm writing this because at least two other people wrote to me with
questions about the DS3305. I bought mine from OnSale.Com for $2650 (plus
CA sales tax, ouch!), in the category:

	http://www.onsale.com/category/Servers.htm
specifically:
	http://www.onsale.com/category/inv/00000331/01682214.htm
	(that item closes Mon Apr 12, but I've seen them extended
	when the item doesn't sell, and I bet they'll appear again)

Anyway, my attempts to get it to boot on either the 19981016 or 19990325
snapshot kernels failed, so I appealed for help here.

Today and tonight, Chris Demetriou compiled successive test kernels for me,
and the most recent one gets as far as it can get, netbooted with no root
filesystem ready for it (i.e. full system autoconfig, and then it panics
when it can't find /sbin/init; this is expected). I will be attempting a
full system install tomorrow morning, after I get some sleep.

The surprise was that this machine returns a negative machine type (!!)
which NetBSD was not expecting. I'm sure Chris will check in the changes in
the next day or two, after a little more testing, and puzzling over why DEC
did things this way for this box. It's my hope that we can include support
for this system with NetBSD 1.4.

A big Thank-You to Chris!

The next thing I tried was putting an additional Ethernet I/F into the
system: a NetGear FA-310TX 10/100 PCI bus Ethernet card (Rev D2), and
booting that working kernel again. The kernel reported:

Lite-On Communications 82C168/82C169 (PNIC) 10/100 Ethernet (ethernet
network, r
evision 0x20) at pci0 dev 12 function 0 not configured

and right on the biggest chip on the card are the markings:

	LC82C169C
	9903A
	ECP22

So, it seems that the GENERIC kernel does not have a driver that recognizes
this chip. What's the current "best of breed" (i.e. not brain-damaged) PCI
10/100 Ethernet cards that NetBSD will drive well?

	good night,

	Erik <fair@clock.org>