> Haha...you should have posted this to freebsd-users@ :-D

I was afraid to. :) I've heard many things about the FreeBSD public
but aversity to flaming was not one of them. :)

> I dunno, windows 95 tends to be anal about hardware sometimes...

True enough--but as long as the partitions are set up correctly and
you've got the updates for it it works out okay.

> Who said NetBSD didn't?!  Just because the NetBSD website doesn't brag
> about performance as much as FreeBSD's does, doesn't mean it can't handle
> big loads ;)  I have a system here with a 9+ constant load that does smtp,
> www, samba, ftp and firewalling for at least 200 boxes and 500 users, and I
> haven't fooled with NMBCLUSTERS at all; this is the default install.

I ran many websites ( > 15) with terabyte-per-month CGI-fed traffic. I
also ran some download sites that did multi-terabyte traffic. In doing
so I learned many great and wonderous things. One of them was that
monkeying with NMBCLUSTERS wasn't enough. I was getting panic()'s left
right and center until I tuned up five or six other parameters as
well.

> By the way, NetBSD does support brooktree cards, like WinTV and stuff, and
> the applications you're looking for that support the cards are 'fxtv'
> and 'xawtv'.  For mpeg, mpeg_play works and mpegtv (mtv) work fine under
> emulation, there is also xanim.  You just gotta look around in pkgsrc,
> there's tons of stuff for multimedia.

True enough--I watch TV in a window on my home NetBSD-based desktop
right now. But did you try fxtv's video capture functionality? I had
to specifically port mplex, mpegaudio, and mpeg_encode before I could
get it working. None of those are in the pkgsrc but I think should be.
:) Maybe I should port some other FreeBSD ports I found useful to
NetBSD too...  so much to do, so little time. :)

> Yahoo uses FreeBSD, Google is strictly Linux boxes clustered together...

Right--forgot about that. But many others use FreeBSD--hotmail for
example, if I recall correctly.

> Yes...NetBSD will always be number one, you can't escape it ;)

=]

> You can do most of the stuff with sysctl -w, I don't remember doing
> gdb /netbsd in a long long time (then again, I just recompile kernels).

Some of it I wanted default rather than putting it into sysctl.conf
and I wanted it up and running promptly. Afterwards I would compile it
directly into a kernel once the machine was up and running (and so I
had a proper kernel config to match my gdb monkeying) but in the
meantime the machine *had* to be up and running. $50,000/month
customers aren't people you brush off lightly. :)

in any case, I was very lucky--many people here helped me out
considerably with my problems and I'm grateful to them for it. I'll
write that FAQ eventually, promise!

marc