Quoting J Blaser <oldcpu@rogerwilco.org>:

> {big snip}
> 
> I'm at a loss on what I might do next.
> 
> Thanks for any suggestions.
> 

Well, I have more news.  Without any other ideas, I pulled all the boards in the system, except for the CPU, the memory, and the DELQA.

In this configuration, I successfully netbooted NetBSD 1.5.3, and was able to configure the network!

I put the RDQX3 controller back in, and the kernel still recognized the ethernet controller.  So, with that form of setup, I went ahead and imaged the disk, which was my primary goal at the moment.

When I put all the boards back into the backplane, positioned and configured just as they were originally, again the ethernet was not recognized by the install kernel.

It's funny that the bootloader can get across, and the kernel can be downloaded just fine, but probably when the kernel sniffs around for installed components, something gets triggered on one of the boards that creates some kind of conflict with the DELQA (or the DEQNA).

So, I've got to again remove all the boards, and examine them very closely for any strange configurations.

I should state that this system is new to me, hasn't been used for at least 15 years, so this is all a bit of a gamble, but I *was* able to get NetBSD running on it, at least in a minimal configuration.

I really doubt that this is a software problem.  It'll be a few days (or a couple of weeks) before I have the chance to pull the boards for that examination, but I'll report what I find at that time.

Thanks, Ragge and Tobias, for your responses.

Regards,

Jared