I recently installed NetBSD for the first time, on a remote VPS. All was fine, I installed pkgin, got some packages installed, installed openssh-portable, got my firewall rules set and so on. Having used FreeBSD and OpenBSD before it was a little different, but not too different.
Then one day, or rather late at night I found I needed to install some X11 sets and fired up sysinst. It being late, I did not read everything very carefully, but quickly found "re-install sets", "custom installtion", and then the X11 sets at the bottom of the menu. I selected them and started the installation.
It took a little longer than expected, and I noticed it was reinstalling base for some reason. No worries I thought, I hadn't touched that in the few days the system had been running, so it shouldn't be a problem.
Then when everything was finished, I noticed things were not working as expected. I think I managed to kill the sshd listening daemon and couldn't start it again. Then I noticed /etc/rc.conf was blank, so I had no network configuration, no sshd startup, no nothing. It seems /etc had also been replaced with defaults.
So by my lonesome, I had quite quickly managed to make quite a mess of things. Fortunately I did not reboot as was my first intuition when I found things weren't working. Sshd from packages required another script which had been replaced, the original sshd I had set to listen on another port which wasn't allowed through current firewall rules and so on.
Sorry for the boring ending, but it was all fully recoverable from my one ssh connection that fortunately didn't drop. Got network configured again, got firewall set up and started, got correct sshd started and so on. Then reboot, and all was good. Thanks to good documentation and easy configuration.
And that is why I #RUNBSD
Even being completely new to #NetBSD it was easy to recover.
I've re-tried sysinst after the fact, and now see base, /etc and so on will be re-installed by default if you don't uncheck them, so now I know.
