NetBSD and my life (2005)
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
A sysadmin credits NetBSD with saving his career and family time after Windows failures.
Gary Rolland, a UK network admin for a large company, describes migrating 29 servers from Windows to NetBSD 2.0.2 after repeated crashes ruined a promised trip to Alton Towers with his daughter. The NetBSD servers handle MySQL, Apache, Postfix, and Samba for over 4,800 users, pushing 870GB of data daily. After the switch, stability improved so much that weekend on-call duty was eliminated, and the team administers remotely via SSH. Rolland expresses gratitude to the NetBSD developers for improving his personal life.
What commenters are saying
Commenters praise the story's heartwarming authenticity, with many sharing similar experiences of BSD or Linux saving their careers. Some question why NetBSD was chosen over FreeBSD or Linux, but others note NetBSD's portability across architectures, including old SPARC and embedded devices. One commenter calls NetBSD "the only Unix that is still fun to hack on." A minor correction notes that "35 requests per minute" is low even for 2005, likely due to a poorly written PHP app. Several express nostalgia for early Unix hacking.