(First off, vaguely because it was once a 7200, the motherboard of
which I've replaced with a 7500, and because it has a 150 Mhz 604 card
in it right now, probably to be an XLR8 G3 card within a month. It
does have the standard 7500 motherboard, and so the Ethernet hardware,
PCI chain, MESH controller, and so forth that came with them.)

I have two hard drives, one of which still runs MacOS 8.6 happily and
the other of which saw a lot more use recently running LinuxPPC. They
are both on the internal chain, and are both fast-and-narrow SCSI
drives, plugged into the appropriate SCSI jack on the motherboard.

Really, though, I'd just been running Linux until I had the time to
get NetBSD/macppc to boot.

So, now I've downloaded the boot floppy image, dded using the Suns in
the lab at swarthmore.edu, discovered that, happily, the Open Firmware
in my machine seems to be smart enough to remember the output-device
and input-device settings as well as the auto-boot? false one... till
you boot into MacOS, which zaps it (which is really weird... at first
I thought this was LinuxPPC's BootX doing that, but it's long since
out of my MacOS System Folder, and I still have to connect through the
serial port after I've booted to macos - no big deal, I have plenty of
macs lying around), figured out how to actually boot off of the floppy
from OpenFirmware (boot fd:0 - took me a while to figure out the
device name, and that isn't mentioned anywhere in the INSTALL or
README files available at ftp.netbsd.org/.../macppc/, at least not
that I saw), and booted happily from the floppy (with one minor,
inexplicable hang trying to initialize md0 the first time though, but
it went away with a reboot, so whatever).

My problems start when I try to set up the network. This machine is
sitting on the swarthmore.edu public network, and (in theory) is
supposed to use DHCP. However, the way I've always set my Unix
machines up on this network (well, those that were in dorms, at least
- I'm also a sys admin in the CS department here, but that's a whole
different ballgame) is to boot into MacOS (all my boxes are former
macs, ::shrug::), get a DHCP lease, write down the IP address, subnet
mask (actually, that's always 0xffffff00/255.255.255.0 here), and
default route, then reboot into the real OS and put that information
in manually. This worked for MkLinux, LinuxPPC, and NetBSD/mac68k, so
there's nothing wrong with the theory (and the DHCP server is sure not
to care because it just leased the IP to a MAC address and, lo and
behold, it's still that same MAC address trying to use it). I also
need an IP address of a DNS, of course, and I give it a valid one
(130.58.64.20 which resolves to oak.cc.swarthmore.edu - don't bother
trying to ping it, swarthmore.edu blocks ICMP at our upstream router).

After affirming that all the information is correct, however, I watch
sysinst hang without ever displaying the next screen. Well, that's not
true... it got to a test ping of the name server once... and hung
there.

So, I got a bit miffed, took matters into my own hands, got myself into
a shell instead of into sysinst, ifconfiged the information onto mc0
myself, and tried the ping... which is when we get to the *really*
neat part (the below is fabricated because I'm lazy and want to cut
and paste between xterms rather than transcribe, but I promise this is
really what it says):

0 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 0% packet loss

That's after waiting at least thirty seconds. Heck, I waited about
five minutes one time. Yes, ifconfig says the card is up. Yes, it has
the right broadcast address (130.58.xx.255). Yes, it has the right
hostmask. Yes, the network works when I boot into MacOS.

My only thoughts are:

1) mc0 isn't my ethernet card. It's the only one that sysinst suggests
as even possible (so the only one it'll let me configure), and
ifconfig happily configures the device, but maybe I'm missing
something?

2) The ping on the boot floppy's broken.

3) The ifconfig on the boot floppy's broken.

Umm... any other information someone would need? Oh, I don't have a
dated boot.fs, but it's this one:

parsley:~/netbsd 504$ ll boot.fs
-rw-r--r--   1 gr       users    1474560 May 11 03:38 boot.fs

Which I got Sunday, August 22, 1999 from:

ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.4/macppc/installation/floppy

NetBSD/macppc looks really promising, I hope I don't have to revert to
Linux. Any help would be appreciated. :^>

       ~ g r @ granularity.net

PS, what was with www.netbsd.org over the weekend? Anybody know?