[Docter60]

Okay firstly, thank you Raion for your reply, any and all info on the matter is much appreciated!  After a weekend of brainstorming, troubleshooting, and testing, I have a raspberry pi that can both net install IRIX and net boot IRIX to the Octane.  I don't exactly know how stable it is yet for long sessions, but I can at least bring myself to the root's desktop and shut down properly.

My setup procedure is the following (briefly):  The Octane is set up as a mock diskless server where the dskless_server subsystem is installed along with all the /var/boot programs.  The pi provides an NFS directory where the diskless tree will be installed to.  After mounting the nfs directory on the Octane, I go through the processes described in the diskless guide to create a share tree and client tree catered for the Octane.  After installation, I took note of how the Octane's local configuration files for exports, hosts, bootparams, and inetd.conf were changed.  I also had to check the client tree's /etc/hosts because the Octane put 127.0.1.1 instead of the LAN IP.  Rebooting and changing the PROM variables resulted in a lot of trouble, but lots of reconfiguring eventually got it working.

Right now I'm using nfs-kernel-server with NFS2 and 3 enabled only. I had a problem where bootparamd was sending back resolved IP addresses from the pi's /etc/hosts instead of the hostname (this, again, sent 127.0.1.1 instead of the LAN IP), so I just used the IP address in the bootparams configuration file.

Currently I feel that the setup is in a "proof of concept" state, meaning it is messy but attainable. So I'll be continuing to polish and test more in the near future.  I also just revived an Indy, so that will be another machine to test on.