Ok, I've got everything running real smooth on 
the ELC now, and I must say that NetBSD absolutely ROXXS!!
Kudos to everyone.


This is a short summary of a quick investigation into
netbooting the Sparc ELC to install NetBSD-1.5.

1 The ram.aout image doesn't execute on a ELC.
  The PROM error is: inappropriate file type or format
2 Untarring installation/netboot/rootfs.tgz and placing a netbsd.GENERIC
  kernel on the nfsroot boots like a charm and starts the install.

As for the daemons, what works is marked with an 'O' in the next table.
Works here means that there is packet exchange between the daemon and
the client and that the desired result is achieved.

		     rarp     bootparam	     tftp/nfs

SS5 SunOS 4.1				     not tested
Ultra-1 Sol 2.5       O                      O
SS5 Linux             O                      O
x86 Linux             O                      O
x86 FreeBSD           O          O           O

Details about the OSes:

-SunOS wis02 4.1.4-JL 3 sun4m
-SunOS wis04 5.5.1 Generic_103640-32 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-1
-Linux wis03 2.2.17 #1 Fri Sep 22 12:01:06 JST 2000 sparc unknown
 (Debian stable, Linux netkit 0.10)
-Linux pyxis23 2.2.18 #1 Tue Jan 23 00:08:42 JST 2001 i686 unknown
 (Debian unstable, Linux NetKit (0.17))
-FreeBSD pyxis30 4.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE

We might conclude here that bootparam is rather unreliable  8-)
What's more surprising is that bootparamd for FreeBSD and Debian/Linux
seems to come from the same sources...
In all failed cases, bootparamd simply ignores the 'whoami' request.
Nothing is printed, no debug messages, nothing. The same was
true with rarpd from SunOS 4.1.4. 
Tcpdump shows the requests, by the daemon doesn't reply...

I'm not going to investigate any further unless this 'issue' 
needs to be badly resolved...

Thanks for all the suggestions.

--
Ragga