
NetBSD 6.1.2 has been released - sgt
http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-6/NetBSD-6.1.2.html
======
spongle
I set up a dialup gateway for a company with NetBSD 1.3 in 1998 on a compaq
pentium 90 desktop with 32MiB of RAM. I got a call last year (!) from the
owner saying it stopped working suddenly. Pulled the disk on it and plugged it
into an IDE/USB adapter and looked at the syslog as I had no ps2 keyboard and
it didn't have USB.

Suspected hardware failure at that age.

Max uptime: 8 years, 122 days!

It was still being used (on a dialup). It stopped working due to the dialup
company stopping service rather than a hardware failure.

Has been replaced by a cheap ADSL connection and router. Ironically this had
only been an option for about 6 months due to the rural location and no DSLAM
at the local exchange.

Wonderful OS although I'm ashamed to say I left telnet open to the public
internet.

The same can actually be said for Windows NT4 as well which tends to show up
unexpectedly sticking things together.

Edit: some other notes that might be of interest to long running UNIX admins:
Firstly the log files had eaten up nearly all the disk space (2Gb) so rotate
them! Secondly the clock had drifted by about 5 days so use ntp. Thirdly,
don't assume that if you leave something that it'll be sensibly secure in a
few years so they need to be kept religiously up to date. Fourthly, plan for
connectivity modes to change over time and keep them up to date; the company
was down for 4 days whilst BT got their arse in gear (not that they cared as
they had 3G that worked reasonably well). Fifthly, buy good quality hardware -
it does last!

~~~
ivanbrussik
"...I'm ashamed to say I left telnet open to the public internet."

how many people are really running war dialers these days :)

very good work, you should definitely have that on your resume

~~~
spongle
According to the logs, quite a few telnet attempts until about 2003 then it
tailed off. Connection was up for around 2-3 hours a day. No incoming calls
and wardialers as the modem was set not to answer.

No statistics on SSH though as it wasn't even running and possibly wasn't even
installed. I didn't check! :)

(not putting that bit on my resume ;)

------
rch
I discovered NetBSD at the first real programming job I ever had, and I am so
glad I picked it up. The comment that got me going was something along the
lines of 'programmers with a Linux/Unix background just seem to do better
work', said with a shrug by the guy who started the company. I had NetBSD
running on my home computer by midnight that day.

------
danieldk
I have used NetBSD for years (2000-2005 timeframe), it is one of the cleanest
UNIX systems that really sticks to the UNIX philosophy. Unfortunately, it
never gained much traction, leading to a shortage of drivers, etc. In some
ways it is surprising, you'd think that appliance vendors would love a good
UNIX system under a liberal license.

~~~
peatmoss
This was exactly my feeling about NetBSD. FreeBSD was the fast BSD; OpenBSD
was the secure BSD; and NetBSD was, well, never discussed in the terms I found
most useful. People talked about it as the "ported to everything BSD," but
what I remember most was its consistency and clearly thought out design.

Case in point, I remember when WiFi started becoming more prevalent. I can't
even remember the hoops I had to jump through to get WiFi working in Linux. I
just remember being annoyed that I couldn't configure the new network
interface through ifconfig--I mean, it's a network interface! By contrast, I
remember being pleasantly surprised at the lengths NetBSD had gone through to
make WiFi a natural extension to the existing network configuration tools.

I ran NetBSD as my primary workstation OS for a few years 99-03 or
thereabouts, and then on an assortment of other small systems, servers, and
appliance-like things for somewhat longer. I even used the brilliant pkgsrc on
FreeBSD, Linux, AIX, and MacOS X for a while. In the end, I gravitated away
from NetBSD for the reasons you mentioned. It was never a quality problem, it
was an inertia problem. Sad, because it really was a lovely system.

------
sgt
Loving it - HN rediscovering NetBSD. I'd encourage people to download the ISO
and run it in VirtualBox. See -
[http://www.netbsd.org/mirrors/#http](http://www.netbsd.org/mirrors/#http)

------
ivanbrussik
what percent of internet servers run NetBSD?

~~~
spongle
Probably quite a low percentage however it seems to be used as the proving
ground for new tech such as IPv6 and ISC seem heavily into it so it's still
_really_ important regardless of market share.

~~~
atmosx
How so? I mean, why is it important? Was my first BSD system (was the only one
to boot at an old compaq laptop I owned in 1999), but I don't see why would
anyone use it now, since you have Free/OpenBSD which offer much more up-to-
date systems, support for more architectures (RPi) etc.

Your comment above states that you'd go for Windows Server instead of NetBSD
anyway... So I don't see how is this project "important".

~~~
spongle
It's important because it is the last bastion of simplicity in the UNIX world.
It's open, a single cohesive system, is cleanly documented, cleanly engineered
and small enough to retain knowledge on.

It's the ideal foundation to build research upon which is where standards can
be developed.

Everyone has benefitted from NetBSD being around and will probably continue to
for a long time yet.

~~~
4ad
OpenBSD is much simpler than NetBSD these days, but NetBSD now has rump
kernels which are very interesting:
[http://www.netbsd.org/docs/rump/](http://www.netbsd.org/docs/rump/)

------
vezzy-fnord
I believe it is time to upgrade my toaster.

