This cautionary tale seems worth sharing - even if only with the
archives - it may save somebody else as unwary as me from a silly
fresh install situation.

I recently set up a new NetBSD 1.6.1/i386 box.  During the
installation I got prompted to set the root password as usual, and on
attempting to enter a string of all lowercase characters - guessable
only by me of course :-) - was asked to reconsider my foolishness and
use some punctuation .. or an uppercase character .. in the
time-honoured fashion.  

Being in a rush, and having in front of me a standard UK keyboard, my
eyes quickly settled on the handy "\" key (backslash) which is
conveniently located on the bottom left-hand corner of a UK keyboard
... between left-shift and "z" ... so I put one of those into the
password.  

The installation duly completed without incident, and I did the first
reboot ... and logged in as root at the console.  Fairly quickly I
realised the keyboard layout was wrong for the UK (hash, pound, and
"at" in the wrong places, etc.), so I did a quick man wscons (new to
me - the last fresh install I did was NetBSD 1.4.1), and made the
following one-line change to wscons.conf :

  old: #encoding sv

  new: encoding uk

and rebooted.

Aaarrgh.  I could no longer login as root, because that backslash
character I'd entered in the root password was, of course, *not* a
backslash at the time I entered it.  I googled, and surfed for
keyboard layout information, for all I was worth, for about an hour,
trying desperately to find out what that key is on a US keyboard - but
there isn't actually a key to the left of "z" on a US keyboard it
seems.  Or if there is, I couldn't figure it out.

I tried pretty much every punctuation character on the keyboard,
shifted, and Alt'ed, but nothing generated whatever the mystery
character code needed to be.

So in the end I rebooted from the NetBSD installation CD, exited the
installer, mounted my root partition, and edited wscons.conf back to
the default state again ... it was the quickest way out of this silly
mess.

I was moved by my experience to wonder whether the NetBSD installer
should display a warning (perhaps just for us foreigners) just before
it asks you to set the root password (have we already told it where we
are in the world by then ?  I can't remember), pointing out that you
should avoid any characters that might move about when the keyboard
layout is reconfigured, (often done promptly after the initial
install).

I know this is newbie stuff, so I'll go with whatever you developer
folks think - I know you know best ;-)

Cheers
Nick Boyce
Bristol, UK
--
"... the fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by the
superficial design flaws."
Douglas Adams(1952 - 2001): So Long and Thanks For All The Fish.