I am currently upgrading my server from NetBSD 1.6.2 to NetBSD 2.1.

The 1.6.2 server suffers from a crash once every few months where it
locks up under heavy load.  This appears to be fixed in 2.1 and better
and I am looking forward to no longer having to get up at night and
reboot it.

BTW - I know that 2.1 is getting a little old, but
I have tested 2.1 pretty thoroughly, and do not want to go
back and re-test with 3.1 before I do the upgrade.

Here are a few notes from my experiences that I hope will be helpful
to others, I will post some questions separately.

1. The "installboot" man page as of 2.1 no longer has a "macppc"
specific example.  This would be a non-problem except that
the terminology in the man page does not make obvious what is
the "prototype", the "primary" and the "prototype".  It also
looks like it's wrong.  For Macppc, you have to use bootxx as
the "prototype", and you have to "point it" to ofwboot, which has
to be on the filesystem to be booted.  I recall last time I
did this, there was a very macppc specific man page and it was easy
to do.  This time around, I had to puzzle it out, and I had to dredge out
my notes and google around to figure it out.

2. I have tested pppd and the serial ports (Cyclades multi-port serial)
on the G4 with 2.1 that I plan to use for my server.  Serial on that
machine works great.  To my chagrin, it still does not work on the PM 7600
(with G3 upgrade card).  The symptoms appear to be the same as the ones that
I fixed by writing a patch some time ago.  The serial driver "loses" interrupts,
and gets "stuck".  (technical term. ;-> )  I put a nasty little kludge
in that calls the interrupt handler "manually" from a polling loop.
It's not pretty, but it works.  I was hoping that I would be able to
get away from building my own kernels, and could not do this for the
7600.  I ended up going back to the pre-built 1.6.2 kernel to make this
box do its job (dial-in ppp server).

3. In trying to get the ppp server up, I thought maybe NetBSD 3.1 might
have further improvements, and maybe serial would work on the 7600.

Alas, I tried that only to find that in NetBSD 3.1, ppp has been "turned off"
in the default kernel.

4. I may have time to try the serial card and/or serial ports on a Beige
G3, just to see if the interrupt HW on the Beige works as well as it
appears to on the G4.

-dgl-