it is quite similar to what youre used to. 
do a disklabel rl0 to get the blank disklabel. put it in a file and edit 
it to suit your taste. then, use disklabel -R -r /dev/rl0a <file> to
write it. now, you can see it on the c partition, with a disklabel 
/dev/rrl0c.
the i386 port uses the 'd' partition as the one that c is used for on all 
other ports. on a disk with no label, for some reason a is the only one 
it knows to find at the beginning of the disk.
hope this helps,
 isildur

On Sat, 19 Oct 2002, Gregg C Levine wrote:

> Hello from Gregg C Levine
> I am assisting a company in making its Vax system, with a KA655 type
> processor run NetBSD. It works very well. However, they have a quad
> arrangement of RL02 type diskpacks, and they want to use them for storing
> NetBSD based filesystems on them. I am going put down here, the way it
> appeared in the dmesg output for the system:
> rlc0 at uba0 csr 174400 vec 160 ipl 15
> rl0 at rlc0 drive 0: RL02, drive ready
> rl1 at rlc0 drive 1: RL02, drive ready
> rl2 at rlc0 drive 2: RL02, drive ready
> rl3 at rlc0 drive 3: RL02, drive ready
> However, even after going over the man pages for newfs, and disklabel, I am
> baffled. Exactly what steps are to be taken to actually do all of that? As I
> understand things, the disks need to be labeled, and then the newfs program
> creates the filesystem, then if need be fsck would then be run next. But its
> how they are applied, is what gets me. Please understand that I've worked
> with NetBSD/i386 several times, but NetBSD/vax confuses me.
> Gregg C Levine drwho8@worldnet.att.net
> "Oh my!" The Second Doctor's nearly favorite phrase.
> 
> 
>