> It might be worth our (and other people's) trouble to ask what has 
> changed in the netbooting software between 1.2 and 1.3?

Besides netboot change, another pitfall in 1.2 -> 1.3 transition is
the way to establish swap space.  NetBSD swap space is now controlled
by /sbin/swapctl.  It's flexible and smart enough not to have default
swap space indication builtin kernel anymore.  IMPORTANT; you need to
have "swap" designation EXPLICITELY in your disklabel;

6 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize   cpg]
  a:    99750        0      4.2BSD     1024  8192    16   # (Cyl.    0 - 124)
  b:   131670    99750        swap                        # (Cyl.  125 - 289)
                              ====

And, /etc/fstab should be like;

/dev/sd0a       /       ffs     rw 1 1
/dev/sd0b       none    swap    sw
                ====    ====    ==

Without the imformation /sbin/swapctl will complain and system will
run swapless.

Tohru Nishimura
Nara Institute of Science and Technology