Hello, I'm currently teaching a class in system administration using Amazon EC2[1]. In it, I like to expose students to different operating systems wherever possible, and obviously like to use NetBSD as well. Unfortunately, it has repeatedly been the case that the NetBSD AMIs listed on http://wiki.netbsd.org/amazon_ec2/amis/ are not working reliably. A common problem that I've observed myself is that they simply cannot be ssh'd to, despite network access being open. Is there anything known about this issue? Additional feedback from my students frequently goes into the direction of them considering NetBSD the "worst" platform: "This assignment[2] has taught me never to use NetBSD. One of the biggest lessons I've learned in this class." General lack of experience with non-linux aside[3], my students do have a point: - in comparison to other systems, including, in particular, FreeBSD, our use of pkgsrc with binary packages is quite cumbersome. This is a quite serious issue for casual and novice users, who may not (yet?) understand or appreciate pkgsrc's strength - some of the packages built for NetBSD 6.0 Beta simply do not work (on the AMIs?): apache-2.2.21* installed, but the executable failed with missing or conflicting dependencies (I have not yet had the time to file a PR, I'm afraid) It is unfortunate when my attempts to expose students to different platforms leads them to conclude that NetBSD should be avoided, and it would be nice if we could improve on this. Sorry, I'm aware that this email does not contain any direct ways to improve things, but still wanted to bring this up, if only as another reference point in the dicussion around what audience we are targeting. -Jan [1] http://www.cs.stevens.edu/~jschauma/615/ [2] http://www.cs.stevens.edu/~jschauma/615/http-exercise.html [3] http://www.netmeister.org/blog/what-unix.html
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