I've recently acquired several old sparc/sparc64 machines (two tadpole
sparcbooks, an Ultra 1, and an Ultra 5) - and noticed that with
NetBSD-current at least, they all share a common problem. I've
observed this on other network setups than mine, also. The boot.net
gets all the information from DHCP as it should, BUT - it assumes the
root path is blank.

I have options root-path "/egnet/tadpole"; in dhcpd.conf, just as the
install notes specify. Yet the boot loader ignores it, and tries to
load from / on the NFS server. With the ultras, there is a
netbsd-INSTALL.gz kernel, so I just stuck that in / and temporarily
shared /, kludging around the problem long enough to install. However,
I'm not finding a netbsd-INSTALL.gz for sparc, and unpacking
rootfs.tgz in / on an x86 server would not be a good idea ;-)

Any ideas? should I wait till 2.0 (although is it even fixed in the
2.0 branch? haven't tried yet)

I'm about to give 1.6.2 a shot, but I suspect the same thing might happen.

-- 
Sean