Sorry I'm not subscribed to the misc@ list, I read on a web archive. So I can't reply directly to the recent discussion about how to do newfs / fsck etc on large file systems (memory issue).
I have one box with relatively limited memory and had to make a change directly to /etc/rc (yes, horrors)!. The change is fsck -p -l 1 This keeps fsck from checking more than one disk in parallel.