> And - as a followup, there is much mention of console sessions....are 
> you guys referring to hooking up a monitor directly to the serial port 
> (surely not? how would that work?) or are you instead referring to a 
> hyperterminal - or similar - connection? (FWIW I'm assuming the latter)

serial port connection to a laptop or desktop
8N1 115200 (in one place on the NEtBSD pages, the baud rate is incorrect)

You'll need a null modem connector on the serial cable.  And my old Mac laptop can't do 115200 serial so will not work, I have to borrow my wife's new Dell laptop.  Hyperterminal, or similar, yes.

Watching at boot you'll see lots of messages; hitting a key, though, will drop you into a debugger (right?) and you have to 'c' or 'continue' or something to proceed.

I believe it also will drop to debug or something if you hook to serial and connect even on a running machine.  But that's inferred from posts here, I've not tried.

How/what did you do to decide your port was not working?

HTH.

Brian