The NetBSD email: how one admin's OS switch saved his weekends (and his marriage)

A 2005 advocacy email resurfacing on Hacker News tells the story of Gary Rolland, a UK network admin who migrated his company’s mission-critical infrastructure from Windows to NetBSD. His four-person team ran 29 high-load servers supporting roughly 4,800 users — MySQL databases, internal and external Apache and Postfix, and Samba fronting Linux file servers — pushing around 870GB of data a day. The Windows-based predecessors, he says, were chronically unstable and kept crashing under load.

The emotional core is a callout tale: Rolland’s servers collapsed while he was at Alton Towers with his daughter, forcing him to abandon the trip and speed back to work — not for the first time. That breaking point pushed him to trial two NetBSD boxes (a MySQL and an HTTPD server) he configured overnight at home. When the Windows machines rebooted themselves the next day and the NetBSD ones stayed up, his boss approved a gradual rollout across the whole network.

What makes the post a long-running community favorite is the payoff he credits to the switch: dramatically improved stability, an end to weekend callouts (the team now administers remotely over SSH on a rotation), teammates who took up kernel-compiling as a hobby, and enough recovered free time to repair his family life. He closes by thanking the NetBSD project and inviting them to republish his story — which is exactly why it’s still circulating two decades later as a piece of open-source folklore.