First: Thank you all for putting together and supporting a fine system.
NetBSD is serving me well on several machines.  I'm proud to be a user.

Now the disappointment:

I have a Mac IIci that I use to monitor my network.  This machine has been
happily running NetBSD 1.3.3 for about 3 years.  (Up until recently it had been
up continuously for 730 odd days)  It's called "wonder".

Wonder has a modem connected, and it runs a script that uses ping and wget to
"poll" my network and make sure everything is working.  It also
does a very few other little maintenance chores.  If anything is amiss, it
uses the modem to call me.  It works well.

This machine recently has been getting lot of soft errors on its old
230 MB hard disk, so I decided that I had better replace the disk.  It also
seemed a good opportunity to upgrade to NetBSD 2.0.  (This was pre-2.0.2
release)

The install went relatively well.  I started with a twin of wonder - another
IIci, and put the "new" disk in it.  I ran into the "disk over 1 Gig" problem,
but otherwise, the install went smoothly.  In fact, I
got smart this time and ran most of the install from NetBSD, rather than
wait for the MacOS tools. (faster! ;-> )

I ran into three killer problems, though.

1. rsh was unreliable.  There are a few of my scripts that do rsh operations
to other machines, and when I ran these scripts, the rsh would
hang (for days, not minutes or hours)  This was unpredictable, but
very repeatable.  (The "other machine" in this case is running NetBSD 1.6.2)

2. Performance of wget was awful.  Under NetBSD 1.3.3, a wget of a trivial
URL would use .3 user .2 sys.  Under NetBSD 2.0, this was 4.2u and 2.5s.
I did some ktrace work and as far as I can tell, this is because NetBSD
2.0 uses nls (multi-language stuff), and does a bunch of unnecessary work.
I tried to turn off NLS in the wget build, but was unsuccessful.
(I think the wget Makefile is busted in this regard)  Note that I could
not run the 1.3.3-built wget on NetBSD 2.0 due to some dynamic
library missing problem that I did not chase down.

3. My ping/wget operations were unreliable.  I did not dig into this to
bare metal, but as far as I can tell, the NetBSD 2.0 system on 68K
just drops a lot of packets for some reason.


It could be that #3 was HW.  I was using a similar, but not identical
"test box" to check out the 2.0 system, but even if it's dropping
packets, #1 and #2 were very worrisome.

I ended up simply doing a dump/restore of the 1.3.3 system, and installing
it on the "new" disk. (8-year old 1.2Gig drive - that's newER ;-> )

I guess this all is more of an idle whine than useful information, but I
thought it would be worthwhile to document my experience.

Maybe in two more years, I'll try again with NetBSD 3.x or 4.x.  It looks
like the HW will last at least that long. ;->

Thanks for listening.

-dgl-