I have to say, if someone's going to mention them, that the SVR4 run levels
were a massive boon to me as a sysadmin.  It made it trivial to
keep several different "system states" configured and available, and switch
between them.  How do you switch to single-user on NetBSD?

I believe it's some kluge like 'kill init with a magic signal'.  I recall that
it hung any system I tried it on (netbsd-current 68k, two different versions).
What if you want to bring the system up multi-user, but sans network, since
your ppp provider is down?

A smart set of defaults files would fix these problems.  For instance, the
system could know that, at run level two, it uses /etc/hosts, and at run level
three, it uses DNS and talks to a nearby nameserver - a nameserver which is
not available when the net feed is down.  There does not appear to be any way
to do this right now; if my nameserver is down, my machine hangs on name
lookups.

The SVR4 system strikes me as elegant and powerful, and seems to deal well
with the question of how to do per-package initialization.

-s