Can somebody give me a few hints/pointers on how to get from 1.4.2 
to -current when I'm on the other side of a firewall?

I've seen many messages about sup and cvs go past.  I think I understand 
the general ideas but I have never used either.  I don't know any 
details so most of the messages when over my head.  I don't remember 
any that mentioned firewalls but I could easily have missed it. 

I'm interested in both i386 and alpha.  I think I'd be happy with  
recent snapshots if they included sources. 

The machines I'm interested in won't run a stock kernel - they run 
out of mbufs because I have too many network devices.  I could yank 
some boards and get started by installing a snapshot, but that's 
a pain-in-the-ass that I'd rather avoid and I still need the kernel 
sources to build a useful kernel. 

gatekeeper.dec.com has a mirror of NetBSD.  It's got an interface 
on the internal net and I have a good connection to that.  Can I 
just FTP the source tree over and go from there?  If so, how do I 
get ftp to copy a tree?  (I just made yet another pass through the 
man page and didn't find it.) 

If I get a new kernel built, will the 1.4.2 userland work well enough 
to unpack a snapshot?  Or is that asking for troubles?