In message <Pine.NEB.4.33.0201022301410.551-100000@chylonia.3miasto.net>, Wojci
ech Puchar writes:
>>
>> 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.

A recent news story 
(http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/12/29/review.dvd.recorders.ap/index.html)
claims that (in the U.S.) DVD-Rs cost about $10, and rewritable ones 
about $5 more.  I haven't tried hard to verify either number, but a 
30-second search of one Web site found one brand of rewritable DVD at 
US$19.  Not cheap, compared to CD-R, but I can certainly afford a few 
for level 0 dumps.  And as you point out, most level 1 and higher dumps 
won't take up more than one CD-R.

As for

> 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.

Yes, I can write a script that uses pipes, and I probably will (I 
hadn't realized that piping dump | mkisofs | cdrecord would work).  But 
I'd prefer a solution that let me use dump/restore's volume-switching 
feature.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb
		Full text of "Firewalls" book now at http://www.wilyhacker.com