> - The SCSI performance seems a little slow.  I know this is a fairly old
> machine, but I have a few x86 boxes of similar CPU speed (33mhz), and
> the IDE on my 486's seems significantly faster in NetBSD.  Not that I'm
> complaining, I'm just wondering if it's the drive or the architecture.
> Once something is loaded into memory, it seems to run reasonably fast.

There is some issue with the SCSI on some of the machines; the Q800
happens to be one of them. I have two Q800s, one with 1.4.2 and one with
1.5, and the SCSI speed difference is night and day. I'd love to know what
broke in 1.5.

> - The installer I found on the Walkthrough page does not create the
> /dev/ttyE0 device.  I had to add that manually.  It did however create a
> ttye0 (lowercase "e").  Not too sure if that is a bug in the installer
> or not.

The MacOS side installer hasn't been updated yet.

> - How do I enable soft-updates?

Add the softdep option into /etc/fstab (man mount lists ffs options)

> - What type of stability does this platform offer?  Should I trust it to
> do secondary DNS or similarly light tasks for a network of 25
> computers?  What about something like more demanding like dialup
> NAT/Firewall/Socks5 with 25 computers?

As long as the hardware is not defective, it'll run forever.

> - Can the serial ports on a Quadra 800 handle 57,600 baud (or 115,200).
> In the x86 world we have to worry about which UART chip our serial ports
> use when adding a 28.8K or higher external modem (UART buffer
> overflows), is it the same with older Macs?

In my experience, the Q800 will handle 57600 with no problems at all. I
haven't tried 115200.

> Sorry for inundating you all with questions but I'm very excited to have
> this running and want to explore every possibility :)

It's been a year of NetBSD for me, and I still feel that way!

John Klos