Post by @scott@mastodon.clitheroe.ca
NetBSD sea trials day 1 - learned how to install NetBSD to a RAID-1 raidframe array following this guide: https://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/how_to_install_netbsd_on_raid1_using_raidframe/
Setting up the partitions themselves can be done in the extended partitioning menu in sysinst, but I _think_ you would still need to mark the partitions active, and also run installboot from that guide manually, so it's just as easy to do it all at the command line ahead of time - that cost me a few attempts before the guide.
Regardless, it works :)
NetBSD sea trials day 2 - currently doing work to free up my secondary machine for a bare metal NetBSD install now that a root-on-RAID config is understood (and documented in my wiki). This mostly consists of migrating a couple VMs back over to my primary machine, writing out a NetBSD USB stick image, and I ordered a cheap KVM as a quality of life item (the second machine ran headless)
Also tried running sysupgrade in the NetBSD sea trial VM
While I'm waiting for stuff to shuffle around and also get another backup cycle in, I'm reading up on the overlap and interaction between pkgin (binary package manager) and using pkgsrc to build and install software in the pkgsrc tree.
I'm leaning towards using pkgsrc as primary, because ultimately, I'd like to actively support NetBSD packages in the amateur radio space - there's no linbpq, nor xastir package, and those are things I could try and contribute as an example.
re: pkgsrc, the idea of building everything is appealing, but also maybe daunting; I wonder how long building firefox would take.
This machine will have a 1 TB root disk, so I should have plenty of space for pkgsrc to do its thing, and I'm in no rush, so we'll see!
@scott my 11th gen i5 on laptop builds Firefox in half an hour or so, with most deps pre-installed - as a point of reference
@scott
It depends mostly on how fast your disk is and how much memory do you have. Sorry, linux-user here, but making 24GB /var/tmp/portage in memory (a place where all the compilation actually happens on my Gentoo linux) helps a lot! And a side-effect is that the compilation doesn't wear out your ssd (I assume).
VMs moved, fresh local and offsite backup cycle run, secondary machine idled, and the KVM I ordered arrived while I was out for a run.
After a slice of apple pie, I think it's go time.
Reclamation day is at hand!