Just an FYI...
last I heard, you couldn't use the ThinWire connection under NetBSD yet.  
TP or AUI was OK, but not Thin.  This may be part of your network problems.

ThinWire does work under Linux, though.

good luck,
Jonathan

On Wed, 6 Nov 1996 tm@squonk.net wrote:
> Also, after shutting down the system, I tried booting from the net again,
> and now it fails, and the packet sniffer sees no packets from the alpha.
> If it makes any difference, the firmware ewa0_port and ewa0_mode variables
> are set to thin-wire, which is what I'm using.  I noticed when I was
> originally trying to boot from the network, if ewa0_mode was set to auto,
> which was the default, the sniffer wouldn't see any packets from the alpha.
> When I switched it to thin-wire, then it started to work.