Re: [netbsd-users] About using NetBSD as a guest, why, how etc.

["Malcolm Herbert" <mjch%mjch.net@localhost>]

Mayuresh - I find NetBSD in a VirtualBox VM under Ubuntu quite nice. In my case I also use encrypted zpools for my data which Linux supports now.

I like using VirtualBox+packer+vagrant with the bento[1] packer configs to spin out VMs of different types.  

My only gripe with VirtualBox is that it doesn't have native client tools support for the *BSD family and the vboxfs filesystem isn't available - ordinarily these provide file-level access to the host filesystem and vagrant heavily uses this.  Instead (for example), the packer+vagrant config for FreeBSD will use NFS which works but is a bit more fiddly to set up.

Unfortunately there is no bento recipe for NetBSD at all, so you'd have to build out the VM manually ...

I would like to create a bento recipe for NetBSD, however the bit that's preventing me doing this is understanding how to properly add disk labels and bootblocks from the command-line - one can stuff keys into the VM to drive sysinst but this is a nightmare to debug ... is doing a manual from-scratch install from the command-line documented anywhere?

Regards,
Malcolm

[1] https://github.com/chef/bento

-- 
Malcolm Herbert
mjch%mjch.net@localhost