Thought members of this mailing list would like to hear a success story 
installing NetBSD onto a Sun 420R.

I got the ISO image of the SPARC64 port for NetBSD 2.0_RC1 from 
Karsten's unofficial site.

My first attempt to install went through with no problems, finding all 
the disks, including the external array (it has a D1000 array connected) 
no probs. 

Unfortunately when I went to reboot into the installed OS, the secondary 
boot loader barfed.  Saying ".... Fast Data MMU Miss".  This is not an 
uncommon problem, and a number of boot problems on SPARC64 seem to be 
resolved by updating the OpenBoot PROM.  So a quick check of the version 
told me it was version 3.23 (or something similar), it was certainly 
backlevel. 

After going through the rigmirole of updating the OBP (now it's version 
3.31), which required changing a motherboard jumper and the 
reinstallation of Solaris (In hindsight I suspect putting the flash on 
to a NetBSD FFSv1 filesystem would have been fine too.) I reinstalled 
NetBSD v2.0_RC1, and this time the first boot of the OS off the internal 
disks went without a hitch.  I was on the network, and could see all the 
disks (2 internal, and 12 in the external array) in a matter of about 15 
minutes from the {ok} boot cdrom command.  In fact the slowest part on a 
workgroup server is waiting for the memory initialisation during a 
system reset.

My next task is to compile a Multi-Processor kernel (there wasn't one 
available on the ISO I downloaded, there doesn't seem to be one at the 
releng.netbsd.org site either), and see if it spins up all the CPU's.

It's so nice to install an OS and not have to reompile a kernel just to 
get things like SCSI and network cards working.  We use Debian GNU/Linux 
on most of production gear (including SPARCs), with the odd NetBSD 
machine courtesy of yours truly.  Fortunately NetBSD is installed on our 
core infrastructure routers.

Thanks for listening.

cheers
Phil J