Yesterday I updated my NetBSD box olga to 1.6.2. There were several things that annoyed me, so that I will not switch to NetBSD in the near future.
The update started smooth. The old NetBSD was recognized and I just had to confirm that I am really sure I want to overwrite my old installation. The problems started after the reboot. First, the update replaced the rc.conf and instead of using a reasonable default (like interfaces with DHCP and starting an sshd daemon), they put a variable there to drop into single user mode. After I fixed that I wanted to start the sshd daemon, because the box is running headless. But the update procedure removed the ssh hostkey, which prevents the sshd from starting. In FreeBSD if there is no hostkey, the rcNG startscript regenerates the hostkey, but not on NetBSD. I had to copy and paste the relevant parts of the FreeBSD startscript to regnerate a new hostkey. The next problem. The updated replaced the /etc/passwd, so there was no other user then the root user. Why did they do that? If they don’t have something like mergemaster, than they should not overwrite the old values. This is not rocketscience. But that’s what I love about FreeBSD, reasonable default values.
BTW, I will be offline during Easter, so don’t expect blog entries until Monday.