>  > Will NetBSD run off of a USB attached disk with Parallels?
>  > 
>  
>  yes. the "disk" for the parallels machine is just a file that 
>  osx manages. All my virtual machine disks live on a fast, external 
>  firewire drive.

Ah!  Firewire OK!

>  booting from a usb drive itself could be more painful -- I'm not 
>  even sure it's doable. 

A small boot partition that can mount the external disk is good enough.

>  You can access filesystems on usb drives from parallels though, 
>  but even with the the latest versions of parallels, it's not full 
>  usb 2 speed, e.g. only about 4MB/sec. Virtual drives are 
>  much faster.

For remote work it HAS to be faster than a modem connection???? ... no?

Which leads me to another question.  Using Parallels (or Fusion) 
can I get the MacBook to act as a router/firewall.  Connection to
the internet via modem or WiFi and providing a LAN to another system?
I'm doing this at home with Native NetBSD on i386 boxes, I'm wondering
about the MacBook since you (someone in this thread??) mentioned the
ethernet connection was a little funky.  I haven't gotten any feed back
from OS X groups about if the OS X on the MacBook can do this??

TIA,
Paul N.