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
freebsd = utility: performance, gnu software compatibility, drivers, closest thing to useful as a desktop (still not very), but almost x86 only
openbsd = security: internet exposed services
netbsd = portability: already ported / most easily portable to every cpu arch & platform including old and new obscure ones. If you want a big-endian os for whatever academic reason, it's netbsd on an old sun sparc or pi3. I had an HP Jornada that had a SH3 cpu and shipped with wince, the only alternative os on that was netbsd.
NetBSD runs beautifully (but not quickly) on a 32-bit Raspberry Pi Zero. I hosted a mail server on that platform for about 7 years. I absolutely love how spare the system is when you start it up. You don’t even get a fancy shell, just sh. Running top on a new system is hilarious. It’s like init, your shell, and something else.
Linux was not quite that spare, but pretty spare when I first started using it (1995). I liked watching the text crawl while the kernel brought itself, init, and a few daemons up; and having to type "startx" to even get into a graphical environment (and even that was just fvwm).
It was... cyberpunk. I can't think of any other way to describe the aesthetic, the feel, of early Linux. All these bits and bobs written by many hands yet somehow working together, none of them beholden to how some corporate overlord felt I should be using my computer. I became aware of the suck of proprietary software even in 1995.
NetBSD is a lot like this, still even today. I love working with/in/on it.
The sloppotrons are getting confused about old hardware support in the Linux kernel, so the kernel maintainers are simply removing it. NetBSD's portability is at significantly lower risk of being compromised like this, not least because the project bans sloppotrons outright. We may yet see a resurgence of NetBSD as "the OS for your toaster".
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.
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.
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.
It's easy as balls these days to spin up a VM with the OS of your choice provided it's not terribly taxing (which NetBSD isn't). Go ahead and just try it, man! Take an evening or a weekend.
I once worked for a company where the marketing department sent huge powerpoints presentations to each other via Lotus Notes. All people in the same office sitting next to each other. The Lotus mail server had no real issues with it, but i told them to stop abusing email as a file server and use the shared drive for that purpose. Took some time for them to getting used to, but the shared drive was so much faster for their purpose they quickly adopted to this ‘new way’ of working :)
I had an IT Helpdesk co-op term in the early 2000s that had the exact same problem of marketing emailing huge powerpoint presentations around...but we were on exchange (in the middle of migrating from NT, too!). Exchange...couldn't handle it very well. I couldn't even be that mad as PPT was (still is?) a terribly inefficient file format.
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.
True, but a lot of that size comes from supporting an absurd number of architectures and platforms... That’s also part of what makes NetBSD fun to hack on, IMO.
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.
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.
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.
Uh, much wasted time for one? Be it due to destroyed filesystems because of ugly hard crashes,
because the optimizations I applied during compiling without really understanding them(at that time) gave me many, many surprises, or the potential of destroyed hardware?
Yes, you could overdrive your screens into magic blue smoke.
Or speaking wrong to some interface-card, say SCSI, or ATA-CDROM.
All of that could happen. I only suffered from destroyed filesystems, though.
It isn't wasted time if you learn something, though, is it? To be fair, as a hobbyist I only ever really experimented as far as I could afford if the hardware broke, and anything too experimental I kept the only version of any data off of (that used to be way pricier in time and materiels though, true).
40 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 28.5 ms ] threadI love the subtlety of the dual-use closing-parenthesis here.
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 Alma/Rocky?
Glad you can spend more time with the family!
https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2005/09/
openbsd = security: internet exposed services
netbsd = portability: already ported / most easily portable to every cpu arch & platform including old and new obscure ones. If you want a big-endian os for whatever academic reason, it's netbsd on an old sun sparc or pi3. I had an HP Jornada that had a SH3 cpu and shipped with wince, the only alternative os on that was netbsd.
It was... cyberpunk. I can't think of any other way to describe the aesthetic, the feel, of early Linux. All these bits and bobs written by many hands yet somehow working together, none of them beholden to how some corporate overlord felt I should be using my computer. I became aware of the suck of proprietary software even in 1995.
NetBSD is a lot like this, still even today. I love working with/in/on it.
He might be from around London
2 little,
3 little-endian squirrels
hums a tune
even in 2005 this is abysmal. no reflection of netbsd tho - likely a terrible app.
It was a different time.
Same solution, though...
No idea where it is now but this post has inspired me to have a look.
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.
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.
And it tought me to 'rice' NetBSD like Gentoo, being spoiled by its use-flags. Didn't translate 1 to 1 OFC, but was very noticable.
Also noticable were the many bugs you ran into on the way.
But...
No risk? No Fun!
No pain? No gain!
because the optimizations I applied during compiling without really understanding them(at that time) gave me many, many surprises, or the potential of destroyed hardware?
Yes, you could overdrive your screens into magic blue smoke.
Or speaking wrong to some interface-card, say SCSI, or ATA-CDROM.
All of that could happen. I only suffered from destroyed filesystems, though.
Phew!