>
> Which brings up another question:  what DVD writers are supported by
> NetBSD?  Although the drives are expensive, the disk themselves -- even
> the rewritable ones -- are cheap.  I know there's a debate about

cheap? how much does they cost.

> formats; it isn't at all clear to me if that matters for this sort of
> application.  What does matter is how one can write to the drive.  With
> cdrecord, I have to build a .iso image of the data I want to write.

you always can record through pipe.
i recorded >500 CD's through pipe on 6x speed CD-R on P-133 with 5400RPM
IDE drive, often while listening to mp3's, browsing www, reading
mail/news, sometimes compiling and NEVER had buffer underrun.

i use 8MB buffer in cdrecord.

> But that's quite suboptimal for use with dump/restore.  Has anyone
> tried that?

i probably will.