[...] > Next I booted from the floppy and attemped to configure the ethernet > interface via dhcp. this failed with many broadcasts for DHCP DISCOVER > I dropped to the shell and assigned it a static IP of 192.168.0.56 based on > the subnet which should have worked. I verified that this IP was not taken. > > it still was not able to ping the gateway at 192.168.0.1 which other > machines on the network were able to do.
When configuring network on SPARCbook systems, you need to explicitely force media as 10base5 (ifconfig le0 media 10base5). Miod
