The issue is rather obvious from the notification stand-point, but It's an
honest mistake.  If you've been running BSD on the x86 platform for quite
a while, it's a second nature step that you'd never question.  If you've
got a keyboard less sparc server running NetBSD, _never_ enable a getty on
/dev/ttya, as the openboot has already taken control of the serial port,
and enabling both serial console (triggered by the absence of keyboard),
and enabling a getting causes an undesirable terminal results.  It's
rather frustrating trying to edit /etc/ttys in the middle of an outage,
when less than 50% of your key-strokes are making it to the server.  I, of
course, am not conceding that anything crashed today >:)

*points for honesty*

later, 

-lava