Alexander Klink wrote:
> Starting amd (which somehow only works using forcestart?) 

Do you have amd=YES in /etc/rc.conf ?  

$ man rc.d |col -bx \
 |sed -ne'/force/,/^$/ s/^           //p'

force  Skips the rc.conf(5) check, ignores a failure result from
       any of the prerequisite checks, executes the command, and
       always returns a zero exit status.  Sets rc_force=yes.

Skipping "the rc.conf check" implies (rather subtly, IMHO) that amd=NO --
or no entry at all -- won't prevent amd from being started.  

> Any help to make my NetBSD experience more worthwile

NetBSD's manual is generally excellent, which is more than I can say for
Linux distros I've tried.  I'm sure I don't know what I'd do without
section 5, for one.  

One caveat: NetBSD imports several subsystems e.g. bind, X, postfix, GNU
stuff.  The manuals for them sometimes lack NetBSD specifics.  For
instance, named(8) says the default configuration file is /etc/named.conf,
which is so.  It doesn't mention that NetBSD's out-of-the-box setup has
/etc/namedb/named.conf instead, or that the usual way to start it is with
this line in rc.conf:

	named=YES  named_flags="-c /etc/namedb/named.conf"

I'm sure other people are more savvy, but it took me a few iterations to
get all that.  

HTH.

--jkl