NetBSD and my life (2005)

gnyeki 111 points 28 comments August 22, 2026
mail-index.netbsd.org · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (9 comments)

leecommamichael

> 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.

eahm

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!

tolerance

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

> 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.

pelasaco

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

cavem0nkey

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.

Grimeton

A fairytale is a beautiful thing.

elhosots

i've used FreeBSD, and sometimes NetBSD and OpenBSD after they were forked from the Jolitz's 386BSD release. I think that all 3 of the BSD's have matured into GREAT server operating systems. My work environment has for many years used FreeBSD as file servers, both with UFS / and most recently with ZFS. excellent performance! of minor related interest, at the Santa Clara California restaurant 'Empress of India', both the original NetBSD development team and some of the Linux folks (Linus particularly, who lived a couple of blocks away), would dine at that same restaurant in the 1980's and early 1990's... ...The NetBSD folks would sometimes wear a shirt with a BSD daemon 'buttf ' the Linux penguin from behind... Linux has also matured into an impressive OS. I personally think that the principle *BSD/GNU/Linux crews all deserve to share in a Nobel peace prize for their impact on the world... Much more positive impact on the world than that gates-crap DOS/DimDoze.

avhception

For me, it was Gentoo. I was a little bit lost after a bad time in the public school system, and not sure what to do with my life after that. I was fascinated by Linux, but never really got the hang of it. Used SuSE, which was fine, but I never really knew what I was doing. And then I get into Gentoo. Messed up some stage3 installs until it all started to click for me and I had the correct mental models for stuff and how it all fit together to form a complete system. That basically kickstarted my career as a Sysadmin, and I'm still a Gentoo user to this day (but only on the desktop, too much compiling for my laptop...). I feel very, very grateful to all the folks involved. Of course to all the people behind Linux, but Gentoo especially. In a way, it saved my live. Not sure where I would have landed w/o Linux. I've also used Gentoo professionally on many occasions, of course for one-off servers that I treated like pets early in my career, but also in a more cattle-like role. Had a custom updater that copied a new stage4 into a "B-Slot" (btrfs subvolume) from a golden master system. That contraption drove about ~25 POS systems for a small retail chain.

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
4,128 stories · 37,281 chunks indexed