I was unable to find out how to bring a running system down to single
user mode cleanly in the man pages or FAQ's, other than the suggestion
that I:

kill -s TERM 1

from the init(8) man pages.  

I tried this last night after patching my kernel and it didn't seem to
work.  The system simply stopped responding to the keyboard entirely.
I waited for about 45 seconds and then reset my machine.  It rebooted
quickly and the new kernel came up without any problems, except that
fsck fixed up some trouble in the superblocks.  This happened of
course because I was planning to fsck from single user mode, as
recommended in the section on kernel tuning of the UNIX SA Handbook
2nd Edition by Nemeth, Snyder, Seebass and Hein, and since I never got
to single-user mode I never got a chance to do so.

So, I'm wondering, what's the right way, if there is one, to take the
machine down to single-user mode?  Also, if the man pages are
incorrect, whom do I report that to to get them fixed?  Also, is my
system buggy if kill -s TERM init doesn't work?  Finally, could this
be a byproduct of having replaced /netbsd with the new /netbsd before
the kill?  Going down to single user mode after replacing the old
kernel with the new one is the recommended procedure for BSD system in
the SA Handbook, but possibly that information is inaccurate for
NetBSD?

Regards,
James Wetterau