Status of tape booting NetBSD/Vax?

[Mr Ian Primus <ian_primus%yahoo.com@localhost>]

Well, I finally got a round tuit, and I put my MicroVax 3900 back together. You 
may remember me posting about getting this box going a long time ago. It was a 
real pain, but I got NetBSD 4.0 installed. Then I realized that my computer 
room just doesn't have the available power to run this box with everything else 
- during periods of heavy disk activity, I would blow fuses.

I finally got some time and made space for it in the basement. I moved the rack 
down, moved the heavy box from under my desk and installed it in the rack, 
along with both RA90's. It's up and running the way it's supposed to now, all 
covers on, and it even has a nice 20A circuit all to itself.


So. Now I want to update all the software, and clean up the filesystem. The 
root filesystem is a 1 gig partition on an RA90, and it's about 600mb used. For 
reasons I no longer recall, X appears to be installed. And, of course, NetBSD 5 
is out, so I'm thinking about upgrading.

But, I _really_ don't want to have to go through the mess of network booting 
again... Is there any way to make a bootable tape? I know that I spent a long 
time figuring out that the documentation is wrong, and that tape booting the 
installer just plain doesn't work. At least, it didn't as of NetBSD 4. But what 
about now? Has any of that been fixed?

-Ian