System Administration: Week 4: OS Installation

In this video, we perform a step-by-step manual installation of #NetBSD onto a virtual machine to illustrate the details of the process, including partitioning, boot loader installation, OS set extraction etc.

We also discuss planning of the OS installation by looking at data classification into shareable/non-shareable and static/variable data and think about how to scale this process.

https://youtu.be/XRTDMgIpK68

#sysadmin #devops #sre

Make Your Own CDN with NetBSD

NetBSD is a lightweight, stable, and secure operating system that supports a wide range of hardware, making it an excellent choice for a caching reverse proxy.

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/09/03/make-your-own-cdn-netbsd/

#NetBSD #RunBSD #ITNotes #CDN #Caching #IT #SysAdmin

@stefano
Makes me happy to see articles about #NetBSD
and yours are always a pleasure to read.

Celebrating #WorldRadioDay with the most portable OS on the planet. 🌍

Whether it's the embedded controller inside a vintage radio or the legendary NetBSD Toaster 🍞, the ham/ 📻category in #pkgsrc has you covered.

Why just make toast when you can transmit packets over the airwaves at the same time?
#NetBSD #SDR #PacketRadio #HamRadio #VintageComputing #Linux #unix

Make your own Read-Only Device with NetBSD

One detail that is often overlooked when dealing with embedded (or remote) devices is a key point of vulnerability: the file system.

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/09/10/make-your-own-readonly-device-with-netbsd/

#NetBSD #RunBSD #EmbeddedDevices #OwnYourData #ITNotes

And again @stefano outperformed me While I'm writing my home control system in #C for #NetBSD , he already preparing talk about his home control system for BSDCan

Thats the difference between North, with it's cold weather and low atmospheric pressure, and the South with humane environment :-D

@bsdcan

@opensuse

#redhat something since 1996, then #NetBSD for most 2000's.

now #debian on servers and #OpenSUSE (on a laptop starting with sles)

@cks

OpenWatcom vi is source available.

https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116052015020764901

Ritter's Heirloom #vi is in #FreeBSD ports today, coming from the same place that it has for a long time.

https://freshports.org/editors/2bsd-vi/

It was dropped from #ArchLinux because it did not compile and hadn't changed in 20 years. Ironically, this is because the (GNU) C language had changed, and it has to nowadays be compiled forcing an older GNU C language version.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=2285124#p2285124

Several people have independently discovered the Makefile patch that gets it to build on #Debian and the like.

https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=629775

https://gist.github.com/cwfoo/01abac5c39f398b7e7b16a2b87aa518b

#elvis, the precursor to #nvi, is packaged for both #NetBSD/ #pkgsrc and #OpenBSD.

https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/editors/elvis/index.html

https://github.com/openbsd/ports/tree/master/editors/elvis

#retrocomputing #ComputerHistory #Watcom #OpenWatcom

NetBSD: Интервью с разработчиком

На одной истории с OpenBSD и Вячеславом Воронцовым мы конечно же не остановились, на этот раз в гостях у нас ещё один яркий и интересный представитель сообщества BSD.

https://habr.com/ru/articles/995602/

#netbsd #bsd #интервью #cheusov #pkgsrc #коммиттер #сообщество

As the @bsdcan lists of talks and tutorials have been posted, I can officially announce my presentation:

Don't Freeze in the Cloud: Reclaiming Home Control with NetBSD

In 2010, I was taking more flights than cups of coffee. After a two-week trip, I returned home to a nasty, albeit expected, surprise: an indoor temperature of 7.8°C (46 F). Possessing more time than money, I decided to solve the problem my own way. I built a custom Python-based control system, accessible only via VPN, to manage my heating.

In 2015, after moving houses, this system was demoted to a secondary role, replaced by a shiny, commercial "smart" thermostat. However, I continued to maintain and update my custom solution for fun.

Fast forward to October 2025: major cloud providers faced significant outages. My commercial thermostat became dumber than a mechanical switch. I was reduced to manual two-hour overrides, with no visibility into settings or usage. It was a wake-up call: keeping my home warm should not depend on someone else's server.

I dusted off my solution and adapted it to modern needs - powered, of course, by NetBSD, running on the very same hardware that served my previous home for years.

In this talk, I will share the journey, the technical challenges, and the architectural decisions behind the project. I will demonstrate how NetBSD’s stability and low footprint make it the ideal operating system for long-term, "set-and-forget" home automation, allowing us to reclaim control from the cloud.

#NetBSD #BSDCan #BSDCan2026 #RunBSD #OwnYourData #Presentation #Talk

System Administration: Week 3: Resizing a file system

In these two videos, we show how to resize an existing filesystem. First on #NetBSD using the resize_ffs(8) tool, where we first increase the size of a 512MB partition to 1GB, then shrink it down to 256MB. Next we repeat the same exercise on #Debian Linux, using the resize2fs(8) tool.

https://youtu.be/9l-g3keN48g

https://youtu.be/4V15y5Klo9Y

#sysadmin #devops #sre

On #Illumos, Joy vi is in /usr/src/cmd/vi:

https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/tree/master/usr/src/cmd/vi

On #OpenBSD, Bostic #nvi is in /usr/src/usr.bin/vi/vi; #NetBSD having it in /usr/src/external/bsd/nvi; and #FreeBSD in /usr/src/contrib/nvi:

https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/contrib/nvi/

FreeBSD has an nvi2 in ports:

https://freshports.org/editors/nvi2/

OpenBSD has elvis in ports:

https://github.com/openbsd/ports/blob/master/editors/elvis/pkg/DESCR

Ritter's Heirloom vi is on SourceForge:

https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net

STEVIE was posted to comp.sources.unix in 1988:

https://sources.vsta.org/comp.sources.unix/volume15/stevie/

Unfortunately, Sven Guckes's vi Clones WWW site was never completed with some of this, notably lacking Heirloom vi, for example.

https://guckes.net/vi/clones.html

But it does mention oft-overlooked commercial clones such as Watcom's vi, a from-scratch implementation started in 1983 that is also now source-available:

https://github.com/open-watcom/owp4v1copy/tree/master/bld/vi

#vi #retrocomputing #ComputerHistory #STEVIE #elvis #VIM #NeoVIM #Watcom #OpenWatcom

People waxing lyrical about using 'original vi', both nowadays in 2026 and back in 2006, haven't a clue what that is.

There's only one family of operating systems where 'vi' will actually run the original vi program by Joy, Horton, et al.: #Illumos and its derivatives #Tribblix, #OmniOS, and #SmartOS.

*Everyone else* uses one of the ground-up clones.

On #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD, and #NetBSD, it's Bostic's early 1990s #nvi, which was derived from Kirkendall's elvis, a clone written some time around 1990.

On Linux-based operating systems, vi either is Bostic nvi, or is one of the derivatives of STEVIE (the middle-1980s vi clone for the Atari ST that inspired Kirkendall to write elvis in the first place): Moolenaar's VIM or NeoVIM.

On none of those will you get original Joy+Horton vi in base, or indeed packaged/in ports.

Yes, Heirloom vi exists, which is Ritter's 2002 fork of 1985 Joy+Horton vi. But it's not even available in Arch Linux nowadays.

#vi #retrocomputing #ComputerHistory

This is a clever use of secmodel+kauth to implement jail-like process isolation on #netbsd

https://www.petermann-digital.de/blog/netbsd-secmodel_jail/

Amazingly, there appears to be a Rust compiler available on #NetBSD #riscv. I guess I will see tomorrow, once we have spent the night compiling LLVM.

System Administration: Week 3: Files go hier(7)

In this video, we're wrapping up our discussion of filesystems and partitions with a look at file types and partitions and filesystems mounted by default on #NetBSD, #FreeBSD, #OmniOS, and Fedora Linux. We close with a look at the filesystem hierarchy as defined in the hier(7) manual page.

https://youtu.be/J0ontdqxpUg

#sysadmin #devops #sre

@yianiris @jmcunx @jbz using zfs encrypted roots on many Alpine and Void installs. Zero issues. #alpinelinux makes it even simpler in zfs being a seperate package pre-compiled against a kernel rather than dkms (no sure why other distros do not do this).

#netbsd supports zfs but native encrypted root is not yet an option.

@yianiris @jmcunx @jbz if only #netbsd did zfs native encrypted root...

@jbz

It is nice they looked at #rust and found it good for #Linux, but may limit what platforms #Linux can run on. Curious what that means for #IOT, which I think tends to have little resources when compared to amd64.

I saw this post here on sdf/mastodon from a #NetBSD developer and it nicely explains why #rust as it is now is not really good for use on some systems:

https://bentsukun.ch/posts/netbsd-rust-kernel/

Latest 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 - 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲/𝟬𝟮/𝟬𝟵 (Valuable News - 2026/02/09) available.

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2026/02/09/valuable-news-2026-02-09/

Past releases: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/news/

#verblog #vernews #news #bsd #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #linux #unix #zfs #opnsense #ghostbsd #solaris #vermadenday

Latest 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 - 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲/𝟬𝟮/𝟬𝟵 (Valuable News - 2026/02/09) available.

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2026/02/09/valuable-news-2026-02-09/

Past releases: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/news/

#verblog #vernews #news #bsd #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #linux #unix #zfs #opnsense #ghostbsd #solaris #vermadenday

Registration for BSDCan 2026 is open at https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html + tutorial schedule published.

#bsdcan #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #development #networking #devops #sysadmin #conferences

For more on BSD and the BSD conferences, see https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_is_bsd_come_to_a_conference_to_find_out.html (or tracked https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2025/11/what-is-bsd-come-to-conference-to-find.html +
https://medium.com/@peter.hansteen/what-is-bsd-come-to-a-conference-to-find-out-06acd7d77fd8 )

Built #Lagrange for #NetBSD 10.1 bit it fails to launch, throws a SIGSEGV. Unless I run it as root. But of course then it finds no X11 session to auth, so it runs but doesn't run. But at least no SIGSEGV. That's only for my user. What's going on?!

#NetBSD 11 RC1 released!

No official announcement yet but Phoronix has the deets: https://www.phoronix.com/news/NetBSD-11.0-RC1

@ParadeGrotesque

I believe 'man 7 entropy' will explain what #NetBSD uses that for. On my machine, file "/var/db/entropy-file" gets recreated on every boot.

Victory is mine! #NetBSD 11 RC1 is working!

Overall, pretty uneventful...

Now, I will let it rest for a little while, until qemu 9.2.4 has finished compiling.

Alt...

A white on black console whowing, in bold ASCII letters "NetBSD 11.0_RC1 amd64"

As I wrote before (https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@evgandr/115912395421390028) I tried to use TURN server for communication with my relatives, but failed to setup secure enough solution. So, I decided to try an old and reliable solution — Asterisk. With the help of a book "Asterisk: The Definitive Guide" from J.V. Meggelen & R. Bryant & L. Madsen, of course.

First, I was forced to build the asterisk package by myself (from ports, ofc), since the binary version from NetBSD repository compiled with the all DB support, except my favourite PostgreSQL database.

By the way, adding users and writing dialplan with the help of aforementioned book was not so hard as I expected . Same for network setup. Since, I'm using PJSIP I just opened SIPS port and a range of UDP ports for RTP protocol on the my firewall. Despite, my home network hidden behind NAT on the router, there are no big problems with networking — end-user devices and an Asterisk server connected with use of simple star topology.

Surpisingly, the quality of the voice call is excellent comparing with service, provided by local cellular network operators. I suppose, that the secret in used codecs, or it is because there are not so much users (only 2) of my service.

#Asterisk #NetBSD #sip #VoIP

Alt...

Hand-drawn diagram of connection between my Asterisk server and the two end-users with mobile phones (with Linphone application on these phones).

#NetBSD 11, you are doing the packages in alphabetical order, right?

RIGHT? 😂

Alt...

A qemu console showing the NetBSD sysinst trying to download the 'xbase' package. As with the previous screenshots, the sysinst is trying an IPv6 address first.

[3348/9317] Compiling C object libqemu-mipsn32el-linux-user.a.p/linux-user_signal.c.o

So, roughly 30% done. I think the #NetBSD VM will be done first!

The good side of this, is that I can keep an eye on both the #NetBSD 11 VM and the compilation of qemu on my #Slackware server! 😋

It works, but it is going to be painful: since the qemu network emulation provides the VM with an IPv6 address through DHCP, #NetBSD sysinst tries IPv6 first, times out, then tries IPv4... all of this to be redirected by the web server and go through IPv6 - timeout - IPv4 again.

In other words: it downloads, but really really slowly. ☹️

Any help getting out of that painful loop is greatly appreciated (I know how to do it on an installed machine, just not in sysinst)

Alt...

A white-on-blue NetBSD installation console showing error messages, such as: /sets/modules.tar.xz ftp: Can't connect to [2ad4:ded2:1d::262]:80: No route to host

It seems #NetBSD 'sysinst' still has issues with the 'curses' qemu console, but it remains readable, so onward!

Alt...

A qemu console showing a NetBSD installation disk selection menus. Little display bugs (strange glyphs and added blank spaces) can be seen here and there...