> Can you get to the server manually, specifying a password of "-" (omit
> the quotes)?  As I indicated, I'm not sure that sysinst will honor a
> .netrc file.  (Hmm -- a quick test of 'ftp' with a URL argument
> suggests that it does *not* look at the .netrc file, and hence won't
> honor the "-" in sysinst.  I don't know if that's a bug in ftp or a
> conscious design decision.)

No, I can't even access the server manually by giving "-" as the password.

>
> The problem is the long "230" messages put out by ftp.netbsd.org.  This
> confuses some (stupid) firewalls.  Using "-" as a password tells the
> server to omit the message.  Alternatively, there may be a PIX firewall
> setting to keep it happy, but it's often hard to persuade firewall
> administrators to make the change.

I keep getting a 421 error message.  Again, I can ftp into many other FTP
sites, except the NetBSD mirrors.  The weird thing is that I can ftp into
the release engineering site through our NetBSD machines in the lab (it's
a different subnet), but I can't ftp into releng in sysinst from there.

Thanks,
Yasir