The second attempt — coming soon — thus has promise. The errors were mainly the holes in the code that I'd left ready inside if defined(__NetBSD__) blocks, and hadn't coded for how NetBSD does things. I am from that experience expecting few problems with building #djbwares .

I'm doing half-hour-long backups at stages during the installation process, this time.

#nosh #redo #RaspberryPi #NetBSD

As an aside here, I note that I got #redo compiled for arm64 with no changes, apart from disabling pod2man for the manual pages because I forgot to install it, and was partway through compiling #nosh for arm64 when I lost everything due to a crash that put #NetBSD's UFS1 partition into an unrecoverable state.

There are some errors that even after all these years #fsck cannot fix.

#RaspberryPi

The firmware on a #RaspberryPi 4 does not mind if one changes the partition types of the #FreeBSD and #OpenBSD FAT volumes to EFI system, matching #NetBSD in spirit if not in modern partitioning scheme.

OpenBSD again almost fell at the hurdle here. It is extraordinarily sensitive to the status of its UFS1 partition. Touch it, or attempt to use a fresh one made from scratch, and its booloader thinks that it is talking to an esp device instead of to an sd device, and fails. This is a very strange dependency.

NetBSD, in contrast, did not bat an eyelid when I splatted about 5GiB of home directory, dotfiles, and tooling onto its UFS1 volume, using pax on another machine which had the TF card in a card reader.

NetBSD also auto-fixes the backup copy of the EFI partition table after its device re-sizing step. It didn't bat an eyelid, again, when I adjusted the initial card myself ahead of time using FreeBSD's #gpart recover.

#UEFI #PartitionTables #pax

This is good, because installing and using #TianoCore #UEFI firmware in place of u-boot seems to be the only way to get the #OpenBSD boot loader to recognize the #RaspberryPi's on-board display and a USB keyboard.

It is otherwise insistent on using the UART, which makes it impossible to press that "any" key to get the boot loader to stop so that one can type the magic incantation to get the kernel proper — in its turn — to use the display and keyboard. It too defaults to using the UART.

This is a Pi 4 in a PiHut "modular" case, still resembling that #Blakes7 prop. It's not designed for DB9 sockets, but it has HDMI and USB holes, plus optional plastic shields for covering them to just let power and Ethernet in when the Pi is in production.

Maintenance with just a keyboard and monitor is the goal. OpenBSD barely cleared this first hurdle of controlling its boot loader.

(It fell at a subsequent hurdle, which is why I'm now trying #NetBSD and #FreeBSD.)

#DASD #PartitionTables

#FreeBSD's FAT16 partition is 50MiB, and #NetBSD's FAT32 partition is 80MiB. These comfortably take additional files.

FAT32 is technically superior, with the variable-length root directory, but for DASD volumes whose whole purpose is to contain a couple of tens of boot loader files it's not much of a practical advantage here. And indeed on the downside, the FATs are an order of magnitude bigger.

#OpenBSD's FAT16 partition in contrast is a tiny 8MiB. #TianoCore UEFI firmware, approximately 4MiB, does not fit on it without deleting stuff.

Ironically, it is preceded by twice that amount, 16MiB, in free space not allocated to any partition. It's possible to delete the 8MiB Microsoft partition and re-create a 23MiB one, as long as one saves and restores the contents.

#UEFI #DASD #PartitionTables #RaspberryPi

It's interesting to see who the early adopters in the BSD world are when it comes to various things. Such as the partitioning on their #RaspberryPi installer images.

#OpenBSD has an old "MBR" partition table. No container partitions, just a UFS1 volume in an OpenBSD primary partition and a FAT16 volume in a >1024cyl Microsoft primary partition.

#FreeBSD has an old "MBR" partition table. It too has a FAT16 volume in a >1024cyl Microsoft partition. It has container partitions, though, with an even older BSD disklabel in a FreeBSD primary partition and a UFS2 volume contained inside that.

Waving hello from the 21st century, #NetBSD has an EFI partition table. No container partitions, of course. There is a FAT32 volume in an EFI System partition, and a UFS1 volume in a NetBSD partition.

#UEFI #DASD #PartitionTables

I boot up #NetBSD from the install image, and it has sshd, Postfix, and inetd running before I even get to set the superuser password. Fortunately, by default it's only listening on the SSH port, on both TCP/IP v4 and v6.

But given the amount of SSH attempts per second one has to fend off nowadays, and given that whether sshd is running is a configurable option in sysinst, it's a bit off that sshd is on until the installer turns it off, or one manually turns it off.

It's not even as if it's arguably useful at that point. The only non-service account in the account database at the time is root, and root login over SSH is disabled.

The same goes for inetd and Postfix. Those seem like something that should be off at first until the installer/administrator turns them on, too.

This is an operating system bootstrapped from an installation DASD, which hasn't done any installing at all yet. It has no business delivering mail or being ready for TELNET or finger.

#ComputerSecurity #SSH

In a little more than a week, people like me will be heading to #Ottawa for #bsdcan.

You can still register for the conference at https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/registration.html, and browse https://www.bsdcan.org/ for info.

#openbsd #netbsd #freebsd #unix #development #networking #devops #sysadmin #experience #conference

@lemgandi that's just Chris Barnatt who does gloss over things in a noob-friendly way.

"#Linux" is literally the #OS equivalent of a #Diesel engine as it's customizeable and resizeable from a single cylinder tiny unit that has less displacement than a pint to a giant heavy fuel oil ship diesel who's displacement is measured in cubic meters and everything in between.

• So people can have anything from tiny to huge and from minimalist to fancy with only hardware requirements and their own patience limiting them.

(Some folks will say #NetBSD is a two-stroke becaise it can be made to run on anything!)

Something i found really cool Japanese tongue twister
#NetBSD #RunBSD
https://youtu.be/J76S5q_ETfo

Toot from pkgsrc/www/firefox-139.0.1 under NetBSD/amd64-current. #pkgsrc #NetBSD

Some random photos from OSDay 2025. I gave a talk about the BSD family and why to use them in 2025.

2/X

#OSDay #OSDay25 #OSDay2025 #Conference #RunBSD #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #OpenSource #OSS

Alt...

Me, standing up and presenting myself. "I solve problems"

Alt...

Me and my wife, smiling while listening to an interesting presentation

Alt...

One of the staff members asking me something about AI

Alt...

The trophy - I won :-)

Some random photos from OSDay 2025. I gave a talk about the BSD family and why to use them in 2025.

1/X

#OSDay #OSDay25 #OSDay2025 #Conference #RunBSD #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #OpenSource #OSS

Alt...

Group photo of the OSDay staff and speakers

Alt...

My laptop, with the BSD Cafe sticker, is projecting the BSD Cafe logo

Alt...

Me, giving my opinion about the Evolution of Open Source

Alt...

Me, explaining why I think we lost the value of stability

Hacker Public Radio BSD Overview https://lobste.rs/s/uvozyb #dragonflybsd #freebsd #netbsd #openbsd
https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr4388/index.html

@claudiom @justine

I tried #NetBSD on a cheap second hand HP desktop, and I was pleasantly surprised to see an X11 login and full desktop environment come up right after installation. 🤓

@justine #NetBSD rocks on the desktop. People who say otherwise have probably never even tried it. #RunBSD

Another great episode of #BSDNow is out!

https://www.bsdnow.tv/613

@bsdnow @Tubsta

#Podcast #RunBSD #BSD #FreeBSD #NetBSD #OpenBSD

@farooqkz

The idea that one can just restart X servers and whatnot without rebooting has, apart from the re-executing process 1 thing which is one of the few new things in this area in recent years, been around longer than Linux itself has.

On old minicomputers and Big Iron multiuser systems not rebooting was *normal*, and that's the sort of mindset that Unix inherited.

It used to be a thing a couple of decades ago back when the BBC and others were running their WWW sites on commercial Unices to go to a particular WWW site that figured out the system uptimes and graphed them. The WWW sites running #Solaris et al. had uptimes measured in years. A stark contrast at the time to the likes of Microsoft IIS.

#Unix #FreeBSD #NetBSD #OpenBSD

BSDCan is in Ottawa, with tutorials June 11-12, 2025, talks & BOFs June 13-14, 2025

Registration is open - https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/registration.html

Event descriptions https://indico.bsdcan.org/event/5/contributions/

#bsdcan #conference #bsd #unix #development #freebsd #netbsd #openbsd #sysadmin #devops #freesoftware #libresoftware

If you have missed The NetBSD Foundation 2025 Annual General Meeting you can read more and find logs here!:

https://blog.NetBSD.org/tnf/entry/agm2025

#netbsd #pkgsrc

A small procrastination project with NetBSD Arm. Feel free to visit the web. The counter tracker is saved locally and will increase with every refresh.

https://netbsd.bsd-devlabs.one/

#netbsd #arm #raspberrypi

#NetBSD dropped i386 between NetBSD 4.0.1 and 5.0. And system memory requirement grew from 4 MiB to 32 MiB. What changed between 4.x and 5.x?
https://archive.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-archive/NetBSD-4.0.1/i386/INSTALL.html#NetBSD/i386%20System%20Requirements%20and%20Supported%20Devices
https://archive.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-archive/NetBSD-5.0/i386/INSTALL.html#NetBSD/i386%20System%20Requirements%20and%20Supported%20Devices
@netbsd

@ska

#rwhod is in #FreeBSD, #NetBSD, #Debian, #Arch, and probably others. With subtle differences as they have diverged from the Berkeley root.

https://packages.debian.org/source/stable/netkit-rwho

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/netkit-rwho-debian

Amusingly, the Arch people have given it a systemd unit, but haven't given it a systemd socket unit or done any of the fork-removal work to let systemd handle the privileges.

And because their unit file/rc script doesn't specify the option, it still runs as the superuser on both Debian and Arch.

@ellenor2000

This is what happens when I finally get so exasperated at my machine slowing down in the wee small hours that I comb through /etc/periodic to see what it is actually doing and find rwho in there. Twice.

P.S.: By Friday, please.

(-:

#FreeBSD #NetBSD #rwhod

I'm copying my pinned post from Twitter which reminds me of fun times with lovely people. I'd just left an AsiaBSDCon dinner with everyone in Tokyo:

#FreeBSD, #NetBSD, #OpenBSD? :'D