NetBSD 10

Overview

NetBSD is a free, open source, general purpose Unix like operating system distributed under the permissive two clause BSD licence, known for its clean design, portability and a complete, well documented base system. This cloudimg image is the official NetBSD 10.1 amd64 release with the stock GENERIC kernel, adapted to run as a first class Azure virtual machine administered over SSH as root. NetBSD is agentless on Azure (no cloud-init, no Azure Linux Agent, no systemd), so cloudimg adds a small first boot rc.d service that injects the SSH key you supply from the Azure Instance Metadata Service and reports provisioning to the fabric. The GENERIC kernel already carries the Hyper-V drivers Azure needs (hvn for networking, hvs for storage). It is secure by default: key only root login, password authentication off, no baked credential, only port 22 open, and per VM SSH host keys generated on first boot. Install third party software with the pkgin binary package manager or the pkgsrc source collection.

Common uses

• Run a clean, well-documented BSD Unix server on Azure administered over SSH
• Host general-purpose network, build or research workloads on a permissive 2-clause BSD base
• Provide a portable, minimal Unix environment for developers who prefer BSD over Linux
• Use pkgin/pkgsrc to build a tailored software stack on a stable base OS