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You should try FreeBSD (2014)

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Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#91

Post by lobster_johnson »

dorfsmay wrote: post #64
myztic wrote: post #56

I wonder why this got so many votes to be honest, it's from May 2014 and as far as why one would want to try FreeBSD it is not very detailed. That being said: I use FreeBSD and (obviously) prefer it, but: 1) ZFSonLinux has made huge steps forward and actually (at least in my opinion) is production ready and rock solid (of course it's not as good as ZFS on FreeBSD though, for example it's lacking some features and of…

Are there significant differences in usability between BSD jails and LXC?

There's little technical difference. Both BSD and Linux provide set of kernel-level mechanisms that allow you to run "containers", ie. process trees that are completely isolated from each other and from the host OS. They are roughly comparable, I believe, with mostly minor technical differences.

The huge practical difference right now is that on Linux, Docker and LXC (as in linuxcontainers.org) provide a high-level, fairly opinioned framework and set of infrastructure pieces to build, run and manage containers — and there are no fully equivalent tools on BSD, at least none that are as featureful or mature.

If you want to do containerized deploys on BSD, you'll be writing scripts that set up jails, call rctl, set kernel parameters with sysctl, and so on. There's ezjail [1], but it's nowhere near Docker in terms of scope.

I actually wish there was something on Linux that was less monolithic and better designed than Docker. Its image management is badly designed and annoying to use, and after all this time it still suffers from design flaws such as needing to be the parent of all containers (completely unnecessary given that we have cgroups).

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/j...

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#92

Post by protomyth »

byuu wrote: post #81
protomyth wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its a little premature to worry about NextBSD in the context of PC-BSD. PC-BSD has brought some stuff from OpenBSD over, but I it doesn't sound like they do stuff without proof of working. I guess Linux has SystemD and the BSDs have NextBSD to be fearful of.

> I guess Linux has SystemD and the BSDs have NextBSD to be fearful of. Pretty much. But the FreeBSD developers have a history of being much more conservative on these types of changes. But then again, Debian used to as well. So you never know. I'm all for people experimenting and trying out new types of init systems and the like. I just don't like having them forced upon me when they're clearly not ready for product…

I'll watch. LaunchD isn't bad on the OS X boxes we have[1] and I guess coming from NeXTSTEP, Mach isn't something I have a problem with. I will see how it works, but I'm an OpenBSD user these days so I will wait and see what they think.

1) my main complain has already been addressed with the switch from XML

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#93

Post by gnoway »

bsg75 wrote: post #75
myztic wrote: post #56

I wonder why this got so many votes to be honest, it's from May 2014 and as far as why one would want to try FreeBSD it is not very detailed. That being said: I use FreeBSD and (obviously) prefer it, but: 1) ZFSonLinux has made huge steps forward and actually (at least in my opinion) is production ready and rock solid (of course it's not as good as ZFS on FreeBSD though, for example it's lacking some features and of…

Where is ZoL not up to speed compared to FreeBSD / ZFS?

I've had issues this year w/ Ubuntu 14.04 machines where the kernel modules would not build, resulting in zpools that could not be imported. I guess that's more of a packaging issue than a code issue.

I periodically have unexpected behavior where my filesystem doesnt mount right and I have to re-mount, or the nfs exports have to be re-exported, etc. I've assumed this was due to incomplete configuration on my part but it's clearly not as brainless to set up as native fs.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#94

Post by zekevermillion »

I prefer the "Comparing BSD and Linux" article by Greg Lehey. He clearly prefers BSD and thinks that the BSDs are more elegant OSs than GNU/Linux. Nevertheless, he admits that some users may prefer GNU/Linux for various reasons, and we are left to make our own decisions as to the aesthetics of the various unixes.

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/compa...

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#95

Post by lgunsch »

cwyers wrote: post #42

> If your understanding of the server OS does only allow you to copy/paste random strings from Stackoverflow, you might not really enjoy FreeBSD (or anything besides Ubuntu) — but then, why are you operating a server in the first place? To serve stuff. (To expand on this -- most people don't use software, they use software to GET STUFF DONE. Very few people want to operate a server. They operate a server because it a…

That type of viewpoint is hurting our industry. Just blindly doing things is not productive at all. You should learn and understand what it is you are doing before you do it. Just getting shit tonnes of stuff done is not productive at all if you don't understand how or why you are doing it.

Truck drivers actually know how to drive, Crane operators know how to run a crane, and people operating production servers costing businesses time and resources should also act in the best interest of the business.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#96

Post by takeda »

corv wrote: post #38
mavhc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an equivalent to Debian's Stable packages?

There are several tiers. Nowadays installing a release version of FreeBSD, packages will get updates quarterly with security updates in between as required. In effect the system is suited for production and very stable by default. Other tiers include the stable and current branches which track development more closely.

After introduction of pkg (FreeBSD 10.0+), the packages are build weekly.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#97

Post by mhandley »

unluckier wrote: post #22

How's FreeBSD doing in the exploit mitigation department? Last I checked, they didn't even have ASLR. http://networkfilter.blogspot.com/2014/12/security-openbsd-v...

I'm not sure I'd place much faith in ASLR these days. Bittau's Blind Return Oriented Programming (BROP) http://www.scs.stanford.edu/brop/ makes that only a speedbump, not a real obstacle, for any server that suffers from a stack overflow vulnerability and respawns after a crash. Basically, you can read the return address off the stack a byte at a time by detecting the difference between a crash (you got the overflowed byte wrong) and no-crash (you got the overflowed byte correct). Doesn't take long to recover the return address, and hence find the text location. Their paper is a really fun read!

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#98

Post by gregory-nisbet »

davidgerard wrote: post #90

I like FreeBSD a lot more than Linux at the administration level. I ran it as my desktop for a few years. The big problem: all the software I wanted to run assumed the whole world was GNU/Linux. So I ended up running lots of Linux binaries under emulation. (yes, I could have compiled everything from ports. But the time I spent 3 days compiling OpenOffice to discover the port was known-broken put me off that a bit ...…

I've read about the FreeBSD Linux emulation layer, but don't know that much about it. What exactly does it provide besides emulation of Linux system calls? How reliable is it in practice?

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#99

Post by floatboth »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #91
dorfsmay wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there significant differences in usability between BSD jails and LXC?

There's little technical difference. Both BSD and Linux provide set of kernel-level mechanisms that allow you to run "containers", ie. process trees that are completely isolated from each other and from the host OS. They are roughly comparable, I believe, with mostly minor technical differences. The huge practical difference right now is that on Linux, Docker and LXC (as in linuxcontainers.org) provide a high-level ,…

http://doger.io has links to a lot of simple Linux container runners!

I'm working on a simple FreeBSD jail runner: https://github.com/myfreeweb/sandblast The main idea is machine-friendly configuration: your higher level software (PaaS, CI, etc.) produces a JSON config and pipes it to sandblast, which runs a script in the container.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#100

Post by davidgerard »

gregory-nisbet wrote: post #98
davidgerard wrote: post #90

I like FreeBSD a lot more than Linux at the administration level. I ran it as my desktop for a few years. The big problem: all the software I wanted to run assumed the whole world was GNU/Linux. So I ended up running lots of Linux binaries under emulation. (yes, I could have compiled everything from ports. But the time I spent 3 days compiling OpenOffice to discover the port was known-broken put me off that a bit ...…

I've read about the FreeBSD Linux emulation layer, but don't know that much about it. What exactly does it provide besides emulation of Linux system calls? How reliable is it in practice?

This was ten years ago, I have no idea what it's like in 2015. It's a syscall emulator and a pile of libs from Red Hat. It was reasonably reliable. X font rendering was awful. But then, Linux at the time wasn't much better; Ubuntu had only just started on the process of making the Linux desktop less annoying.
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