Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good
One of Stefano Marinelli's NetBSD boxes sat quietly serving for a decade, because everyone forgot about it. This is how Unix is meant to be.
After this year's Open Source Summit in Vienna, the Reg FOSS desk travelled to Dublin for the 2024 EuroBSDCon. One of the talks at the event was from the man who built that NetBSD server, talking about switching from Linux to BSD. You can watch the talk on Youtube's recording, and his slide deck [PDF] is on the event's website too.
He talked about the difficulties selling his services when what he offers is reliability and the lack of need for much ongoing support. Now, Marinelli has turned his talk into a blog post.
Marinelli attained brief fame in the geekier parts of the web a year ago, because of a long-forgotten NetBSD server of his – which, with no maintenance of any kind, quietly sat there doing its job until it passed nine years of uptime. But that's exactly what you want in a server: placid, unexciting reliability. Even on a home/gamer-level box. Something you can throw together in under 48 hours, which then lasts a decade.