NetBSD and My Life (2005)

Posted by gnyeki 2 hours ago

NetBSD and My Life (2005)(mail-index.netbsd.org)

68 points | 14 comments

cavem0nkey 45 minutes ago|

NetBSD was my favourite playing around OS from the late 1990s to about 2010. Worked on any old crap I had lying around which was mostly thoroughly obsolete SPARC and x86 kit. Did the job. Never went wrong. Good documentation built in. Netbooted on anything.

No idea where it is now but this post has inspired me to have a look.

jambalaya8 39 minutes ago|

I was a fan of FreeBSD over NetBSD; far more driver compatibility in the 1990s. It was nice to play with. Way too hard to use for much (well, online) now, due to the shrinking number of software packages (eg browsers) these days. I still remember how good it used to feel installing NetBSD on (now long long dead) laptop in the early/mid-90s.

cavem0nkey 33 minutes ago||

I would have gone for FreeBSD myself but alas it didn’t run on the SPARC stuff I lifted out of the company skip :)

I think the thing with the BSDs in general was the fact I didn’t always even need any extra software packages on them. The base install was that useful.

eahm 1 hour ago||

Awesome!

Two things:

1) “We were” (sorry I had to do it).

2) Why NetBSD? Why not FreeBSD or Debian or heck even Ubuntu Server or RHEL/CentOS (forgot it was 2005)?

Glad you got the spend more time with the family!

clort 1 hour ago|

As to why, Gary didn't say.. or even contribute again, so we could surmise it was a made-up name to make sure the company he worked for wasn't identified, but some of the replies to his mail went into more detail about why they did, you can find them here

https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2005/09/

tolerance 1 hour ago||

I'm considering initiating a campaign to influence a community space that I'm a part of into running NetBSD on some low-risk infrastructure that we may adopt.

whalesalad 1 hour ago|

I have been wanting to do this for a while. I have used FreeBSD and OpenBSD in server or embedded environments, but never as a desktop. And I have zero experience with NetBSD or DragonflyBSD but want to play with those too.

tolerance 57 minutes ago||

I enjoyed the time I spent browsing the web and reading ebooks while running OpenBSD on a Thinkpad. The same goes for hosting a web page on a VPS I used to rent. I found that what people say about it is true: the documentation is great. To the extent that I needed to tinker I gained a fair amount of coherence about how things worked. This is sort of what I want the guys in my community to experience for themselves.

leecommamichael 1 hour ago||

> This also lead to more arguments with the wife (which leads to a decrease in other things... ;)

I love the subtlety of the dual-use closing-parenthesis here.

pelasaco 47 minutes ago||

NetBSD is the only Unix that IMO still fun to hack on.. no AI, just hack..

whalesalad 1 hour ago||

> NetBSD during peak hours, our httpd servers can deal with 35 requests per minute(internal and external).

even in 2005 this is abysmal. no reflection of netbsd tho - likely a terrible app.

kev009 54 minutes ago||

The way it's written is ambiguous as it could also just mean the peak demand rate, not a capacity peak. I was doing some benchmarks for something recently and noticed how tricky it is to capture all the nuance of a test in prose.

alexpotato 57 minutes ago||

> 12MB email attachments

It was a different time.

tech_army 1 hour ago|

Cool stuff