NetBSD 6.1.2 has been released

http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-6/NetBSD-6.1.2.html

by sgt • 13 years ago

84 25 13 years ago

rch• 13 years ago

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.

microtonal• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

spongle9• 13 years ago

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!

ivanbrussik2• 13 years ago

"...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

spongle9• 13 years ago

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 ;)

gaius• 13 years ago

Ah, I remember that days where you could buy rock-solid desktops. What would I buy now that would last a decade? HP own Compaq but they are not what they used to be.

spongle9• 13 years ago

Indeed. HP's Z workstations are pretty good though.

telephonetemp2• 13 years ago

Very interesting comment; I especially liked the content of your edit.

Say, if you were setting up a system intended to last over a decade right now would you use NetBSD?

spongle9• 13 years ago

No I wouldn't unfortunately.

I would, probably controversially, use Windows Server 2012 on mid-range HP DL or ML series kit. Since Windows 2008 R2 and the scriptability provided with PowerShell and PowerShell DSC have come around, it's a better compromise on usability versus automation that anything else I've seen so far. Not only that, it has a huge supported lifecycle.

Bear in mind I come from a very strong UNIX background going right back to M68K Sun3 era, through Solaris/HPUX and Linux and have used all on the desktop.

ivanbrussik2• 13 years ago

what percent of internet servers run NetBSD?

spongle9• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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".

sgt• 13 years ago

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

vezzy-fnord• 13 years ago

I believe it is time to upgrade my toaster.

NetBSD 6.1.2 has been released

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