Ok, everythings in good and working order. No problems with read only, no
problems with vipw, and finally no problems with the network daemons. All
of these problems were solved simply by reinstalling the system.

Now there is one more problem:

When I try to untar a file(I do tar -x <filename> or tar -x /etc/rc
<filename>) it says:

tar:can't open /dev/rst0:no such file or directory

Then of course, the file, namely the man12 archive(of which I changed the
name to man12.tar.gz after having the same problem with the first name),
doesn't untar and leaves me frustrated. How can I solve this?