On 9/11/05, Shigeki UNO <shigeki@mediawars.ne.jp> wrote:
> [...]
>=20
> I like this kind of story and would like to read some others.

I'm just a lowly guy running a server at home for an organization I
belong to. It's a web based message board and photo gallery that a lot
of people depend on for communication.

This server started out life as a mail server and a place for my
school friends to store info on for classes when I was in school
(since I was the only one with high speed internet) in 1997. This was
Linux. I didn't know much about it, but I was bound to learn. I
started to grow suspect of these CD based Linux distros, which were
adding additional CDs in almost every relase until they got up to 5 or
6 CDs or so. I didn't need all of that, what is all this stuff anyway?
And what exactly is Linux these days? I still don't know. Do I use Red
Hat? Suse? Do I pay or not? Debian seems to be the best answer, but
why bother? I get irritated that GPL licensed packages seem to be
preferred based only on the license of the code, not the merit of the
application. Wrong, count me out.

I had been experimenting with FreeBSD and NetBSD since 1998, but
decided to go with FreeBSD at the time since my main coach on it, my
cousin, was using it. It was fine. In 2001 I think, I switched to
FreeBSD 4.X (4.3? Don't remember) and things were good. By the 4.10
time, I started to get worried because I was testing the 5.x stuff,
which wasn't really a stable release, but was "new technology", and it
would crash for unknown reasons. I started to become very suspect of
it.

By this time, I had gotten pretty good at building NetBSD, making it
do what I wanted, upgrading it, hosing it completely (my own fault,
not NetBSDs), then doing a "bare metal" restore with backups I made
with dump and rewriting the boot code. Wait a minute, that's awful
close to what a "real" admin needs to know how to do isn't it? So I
switched to NetBSD 2.0.2.

I noticed a significant increase in performance using my PHP based
message board with a Postgresql database on the back end. I've had a
few problems using a Samba server with an SMB client on a NetBSD/amd64
machine, but I switched to NFS and it's fine now. For some reason I
don't have the same problem if I mount the NetBSD Samba machine with a
Windows client (hey, I gotta play my games and do my video editing...
Unfortunately not on NetBSD).

Oh yeah, I tried a few times to interact with the FreeBSD message
boards, but I wasn't getting anywhere near the quality of responses
that I had been getting on the NetBSD boards. That means something to
me.

The hardware started life as a P233MMX which I hapily ran from 1997
until 2003, when it started giving me strange problems. I have since
"upgraded" to a dual Celeron 366. I also had a 1 ghz Athlon that a
lightning storm broke, but it was complete overkill for the
application, so I'm back to the dual Celeron. I'm happy to say that
NetBSD doesn't need fancy new hardware to get the job done. Just keep
good backups in case the hardware lets you down!

In fact, I'd really like to use something other than a PC, because PCs
are not very nice. I've been experimenting with all kinds of
archtectures since NetBSD runs pretty much the same on all of them (I
still can't get over how cool that is :). My Cobalt Qube machine is
just a little slow to do what I want, but it would be nice to use if I
could since it's so small. I'm probably going to use a prep or macppc
based machine because I've noticed that the code seems to be stable
and packages I need are there. I've also experimented with Dreamcast
(for my own amusement), hpcmips, sparc, sparc64, hp700, and amd64.
amd64 is my current workstation.

NetBSD seems to be the only operating system with the correct long
term goal. Clean code that will boot on as many architectures as
possible. As the world starts transitioning away from the ubiquitous
i386 based machines, NetBSD doesn't blink an eye while everyone else
has headaches. Which means the future (should be) bright. We can run
on anything! The other BSDs seem to be limited by their missions a
little, especially now.