> I have inherited a diskless Sun 3/50M 4MB RAM.  I have read the
> general diskless How-to and the sun3 specific one.

4M will be tight.  NetBSD is substantially more featureful (or bloated,
take your pick) than SunOS, and even SunOS of that era was tight enough
in 4M that there exist daughterboards that add RAM to the -3/50.

That aside, provided you have a suitably stripped-down kernel you may
be able to get something useful to happen.  It's been a long time since
I tried to use a -3/50 with any amount of RAM.  (I think I own one, but
I spent a few minutes looking for it and failed.  It's probably hiding
down behind under somewhere....)

> My problem is that Sun3 attempts to boot over the ethernet  le(0,0,0)
> to no avail.  I cannot get back to the Prom monitor at all.  I've
> looked all over the place for monitor command list etc to no avail.
> Can anyone send me a cheat sheet showning basic PROM commands.

To get back to the monitor when it's trying to boot, type L1-A (hold
down L1 and type A) if you have a keyboard/monitor console, or generate
a break condition if you have serial console.  (How to generate a break
depends on what you have the serial line hooked up to.  Most terminals
and terminal emulators have some way to generate a break.)

> My machine appears to be attempting to get an IP address for its MAC
> address using RARP.  I have a RARPD server running on a 386I machine
> runnning NetBSD3.1.  Nothing is happening.  No indications from RARPD
> -a -d showing anything from the SUN3 and nothing but a rolling |/-|\
> pattern on the Sun.  I'm ignorant on a lot of this stuff, but I'm
> persistent.

Persistent will count for a lot, especially when it comes to curing
ignorance.. :)

My first step would be to get the MAC address of the -3/50 from its
banner (8:0:20:something) and snoop for traffic from that MAC on your
boot server (eg, "tcpdump -n -s 2000 -i ex0 ether host 8:0:20:aa:b:cc").
This *should* show you the rarp requests, at the very least.  If not,
something is wrong, either with the Sun's ethernet or with your network
infrastructure (cables, swtiches, transceivers, etc).

If the -3/50's MAC isn't 8:0:20:something, its config has got damaged.
I've seen instructions for curing this, but can't recall where, and
haven't found them in a few minutes searching likely places.  I think
typing a ? to the ROM monitor will produce something helpful; fuzzy
memory says the command you want is q.  The JWBirdsall Sun hardware
reference, linked to from http://www.sunhelp.org/hardware, has some
info which may help.

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