in the on-going saga of net-booting/installing NetBSD on a SparcClassic:
the problem was fixed, (at least the tftp part), by downloading
netkit-tftp-0.17
and installing, worked first time!
i posted a notice to the SuSE list, but since i'm using SuSE 6.4 and
they're
currently selling 7.0, it may have been fixed in the new release.

thank you all, now to getting NFS working ;)
-- 
proud Linux user since kernel 1.1.54
icq#42235604