> .... so I thought the problem must be at the rarpd stage.

> And then, run rarpd, which only says "got a packet" many times when I
> "boot net" with the sparcstation.
> Checking things with tcpdump, I get:
> 17:11:49.752023 client > Broadcast, ethertype Reverse ARP (0x8035), length 68: rarp who-is client tell client
[at least I assume that linebreak was spurious -dM]
> until I turn off the sparcstation.

Well, I don't know what's wrong, since I don't know OS X at all.  But I
can say that I'm fairly sure you're right: the problem is in RARP.

It does occur to me that you may need to add the MAC address not to
/etc/ethers but rather to some netinfo database.  Does the OS X manpage
for rarpd say where it gets its MAC->IP mapping from?

> Also, how does the host have to be set up network wise?

I assume your tcpdump is on the Mac, in which case, whatever you've got
is working.  (This is reinforced by rarpd printing _anything_ when the
Sun tries to boot; the packet is obviously making it from the Sun to
the Mac, since it provokes something on the Mac.)

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B