All the problems with netbooting that I was having with my uVAX-II
were attributable to bad RAM on my 2MB board.  I recently acquired [1]
another uVAX-II, along with which came uVAX-II diagnostic disks, which
led me to find that I had bad RAM.  I pulled the 4MB board from my newly
acquired uVAX-II and put it into my original uVAX-II, and netbooting
magically started working.  :)

So now I'm downloading the december snapshot over a (sucky) 28.8k PPP
connection [2], so I can get to installing NetBSD on this thing after
having my girlfriend ridicule me for almost two years now saying I'd
never get it running.  :P

One question, though... my RD53 gets detected as an RD51 on bootup:

[SNIP]
NetBSD 1.3I (GENERIC) #2: Sat Dec 19 21:23:38 CET 1998
    ragge@subzero:/multi/src/sys/arch/vax/compile/GENERIC
[SNIP]
mscpbus1 at uda0: version 10 model 7
mscpbus1: DMA burst size set to 4
ra0 at mscpbus1 drive 0: RD51
[SNIP]

is this normal?  have I screwed up some jumper settings somewhere?

Thanks for all your help guys.

[1] or rather, hauled away
[2] Once I'm out of school I'll get a 256k DSL, but right now I'm poor.

----
  Aaron J. Grier  | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | agrier@poofy.goof.com
      "A few compilers designed on and for the original IBM 370 series
       machines have a more effective register allocater than anything
       GCC has ever posessed." -- David S. Miller on linux-kernel