NetBSD and my life (2005)
- ID
- 17106
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 23 Aug 2026, 3:07 AM
- Fetched
- 24 Aug 2026, 1:24 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2005/09/10/0000.html
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 1.5
- Created
- 24 Aug 2026, 1:25 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developers
What happened
A 2005 email from Gary Rolland, a UK-based network admin, describes running 29 high-end servers on NetBSD 2.0.2 to support 4,800 users, pushing 870GB/day of data, 1,200 emails/day, and handling 35 HTTP requests/minute at peak. He contrasts NetBSD's reliability against the previous Windows setup, which he calls a 'complete nightmare,' and notes the NetBSD servers handle MySQL, Apache, Postfix, and Samba while the Linux file servers go down more often.
Why it matters
This is a historical advocacy post with no actionable takeaway for current builders; it predates modern infrastructure practices by two decades and offers no transferable lesson beyond nostalgia for Unix reliability.
Discussion angle
Only worth mentioning as a brief anecdote about how much operational expectations have shifted since 2005 — what passed for impressive scale then (870GB/day, 35 req/min) is trivial now.