How NetBSD Saved My Family Time: A Sysadmin's Story
NetBSD and My Life (2005)
Gary Rolland, a network admin at a large UK company, shares how switching from Windows to NetBSD transformed his work and personal life. Managing 29 servers supporting 4,800 users, he faced constant crashes and on-call disruptions that strained his family. After a successful trial, his team migrated fully to NetBSD, gaining stability and free time. The move ended weekend on-calls and improved his relationships, culminating in a long-awaited family trip to Alton Towers.
NetBSD changed my teams life for the better.
- avhception
For me, it was Gentoo. I was a little bit lost after a bad time in the public school system, and not sure what to do with my life after that. I was fascinated by Linux, but never really got the hang of it. Used SuSE, which was fine, but I never really knew what I was doing. And then I get into Gentoo. Messed up some stage3 installs until it all started to click for me and I had the correct mental models for stuff and how it all fit together to form a complete system. That basically kickstarted my career as a Sysadmin, and I'm still a Gentoo user to this day (but only on the desktop, too much compiling for my laptop...).
I feel very, very grateful to all the folks involved. Of course to all the people behind Linux, but Gentoo especially. In a way, it saved my live. Not sure where I would have landed w/o Linux.
I've also used Gentoo professionally on many occasions, of course for one-off servers that I treated like pets early in my career, but also in a more cattle-like role. Had a custom updater that copied a new stage4 into a "B-Slot" (btrfs subvolume) from a golden master system. That contraption drove about ~25 POS systems for a small retail chain.
- cavem0nkey
NetBSD was my favourite playing around OS from the late 1990s to about 2010. Worked on any old crap I had lying around which was mostly thoroughly obsolete SPARC and x86 kit. Did the job. Never went wrong. Good documentation built in. Netbooted on anything.
No idea where it is now but this post has inspired me to have a look.
- tolerance
I'm considering initiating a campaign to influence a community space that I'm a part of into running NetBSD on some low-risk infrastructure that we may adopt.
- eahm
Awesome!
Two things:
1) “We were” (sorry I had to do it).
2) Why NetBSD? Why not FreeBSD or Debian or heck even Ubuntu Server or RHEL/CentOS (forgot it was 2005)?
Glad you got the spend more time with the family!
- leecommamichael
> This also lead to more arguments with
the wife (which leads to a decrease in other things... ;)
I love the subtlety of the dual-use closing-parenthesis here.