>So I'm thinking that the best way to do things now is to get two ethernet
>cards, and hook the 386 machine as a ms-dos machine, to talk to the faster
>i486DX/2-66 running NetBSD.  I am thinking that the netbsd machine can
>NFS export it's ms-dos partition (which is already mounted in /mnt/dos)
>and the other machine can use some kind of PC-NFS to run on it.

I don't know if you considered this, but while a friend was staying with me
we had his machine in a dataless configuration - only root and swap local,
and he had /usr mounted via NFS off our machine.  He had a 386-25, we have
a 486-66, and it worked pretty well.

>Question 5: Finally, given this setup, what cards would you choose,
>and what topology or wiring?  BNC seems the most easily extensible;
>with TP I'd have to get a concentrator (or so I believe) when I go to
>3 peer units.  Any other options?  Do they have fiber network cards in
>the low price range (yet)?

Lots of people love TP; I don't know if you're doing this for home or for work,
but for home or low-budget I'd probably go BNC; those concentrators are still
pretty expensive.  I know plenty of people who still do BNC wiring via wall
plates, so it's not dead yet! :-)  (If I had the money, I'd probably do TP
myself).

>Question 7: I'm looking at getting a new hd controller soon; I have
>an AHA-1542B now.  Should I go with the bustek EISA controller, or
>some VLB controller?  Real experience valued here.  I hear that some
>vlb disk controllers can significantly slow down the CPU.  rumor?
>PS: The attached disk is a year-old Microp 2210s.  No other drives yet.
>Another factor may be that NetBSD-curr doesn't have EISA support back
>in yet, and I've already recompiled since then (dumb move)!?!

We have an BusLogic EISA 747s; very happy with it.  I recommend it.  But if
you're running -current, it may not be working yet :-)

--Ken