> I've attempted to install NetBSD on a decstation with
 > no success.


If you want to try booting diskless & are willing to follow some
admittedly preliminary instructions that involve a lot of hand-waving,
I might be able to help:

Many DECstations will boot diskless.  Those that do (including my
5000/120's & 2100's) use bootp & tftp to download the kernel.  On my
5000/120s, I simply say 'boot 3/tftp' at the console to tell it to
boot off the net.  

For this to work, you'll need to configure bootpd on some machine on
your network to listen for bootp requests, and feed the requesting
machine a NetBSD kernel.  Currently, I'm already running bootpd on our
AlphaServer (I boot alpha's diskless for installation) & the relevant
lines in my /etc/bootptab for serving up a NetBSD kernel are:

.ris.dec:hn:vm=rfc1048
giotto:ht=ethernet:ha=08002b1e39cc:ip=152.3.22.84:bf=/some/path/we/can/tftp/to//nfsnetbsd

The 'ha' field is the hardware address of the machine requesting the
kernel, the 'bf' is a path that should be accessible for tftp.  I've
put this kernel up (a generic NetBSD/pmax built from sources that were
current about a week ago, will boot 5000s, will NOT boot 2/3100s) for
anon ftp at ftp://ftp.isds.duke.edu/pub/Users/gallatin/nfsnetbsd.gz

Now, obtain & read the diskless(8) man page from a current NetBSD
distribution & follow the directions as if you were booting a Sun, but
skipping sections 3 & 4 (these steps are taken care of by bootpd, as
mentioned above) In section 8, make sure that you add the '-alldirs'
flag to /etc/exports, if you're using a NetBSD box as a server.  Also,
if you get the client's root partition from the binary distribution,
don't forget to populate it's /dev directory.

Assuming all this works, you'll be running NetBSD on the console & can
proceed to label your disk (make sure that 'a' starts at offset 16!),
newfs root & user, & install the binary distribution.

Caveats: I HAVE NOT tried hosting a diskless install from a machine
running Ultrix; only from another NetBSD box.  If you'd like it, I
have an rpc.bootparamd that works under Ultrix, but I'm not sure if
NetBSD's diskless kernel could nfs mount root & swap from an Ultrix
nfs server.  This is a sort of chicken & egg situation...

Good luck.  Feel free to contact me for more detailed help,

Drew