Hey,

since my last attempts to upgrade my 2.0 box by just untarring the 
distribution yielded miserable results since there were (kernel?) 
problems with package corruption and corrupted untarred files, I decided 
to use the IIci as a guinea pig for a "fresh" 2.1 isntall which was 
released little time ago.

- mac installer based method failed quite a bit, giving scsi errors too 
early, so that the "install something, boot, finish to install" trick 
didn't work, it installed too little

- the sysinst is still broken: it  fails to format the disk, write 
fstab, mount the targetroot...

I worked around this sysinst problem in the "usual" way: ctrl-Z, do it 
manually, continue.

I left the box unattended for some hours downloading packages from FTP 
and installing. At the end, when I should instert the password, the 
passwd command failed with an unresolved symbol (__to_upper I think). 
Other commands that need to be executed failed the same way. I rebooted 
and the screen remains white using the installed kernel in the 
partition...

thus either the packages to isntall are broken and indeed have a problem 
and additionally the kernel too (?) or there are some problems in the 
2.1 kernel which make disk access unreliable.

I wouldn't think of a harwdare problem, the hard disk worked fine in a 
quadra when it run netbsd 1.6 (unfortunately the quadra is now dead, 
thus a 100% check isn't possible).

from what I gathered when I had the older 2.x "beta" isntall with some 
snaphsot userland and kernel I think it is a disk write problem.

- if I ftp'd big files, they came with a wrong checksum but correct 
size. I at first thought of a network problem
- repeatedly executing a checksum on a file gives consistent results
- copying a file on disk locally may give an inconsistent result 
regarding checksumming

(I think here about files of several megabytes, like the tarballs)

thus for now, sadly, I must return the IIci on the shelf.....

-Riccardo