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You should try FreeBSD (2014)

blog.pascalj.com

131–140 of 156 posts

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another counterpoint, my small business that runs full-stack in AWS and FreeBSD - I am most certainly not perfectly educated in server and network management, and actually excel in software engineering as opposed to server management and configuration. AWS lets me get shit done. I know enough to get several services running on an EC2 server, and I don't have close to the $100k+ required to hire an excellent networ…

I wasn't trying to imply a person needs to have the entire set of domain knowledge before operating a server, but simply researching about what you are attempting to do before just copy-pasting bash lines into your terminal and not even recognizing how it even works at all. AWS lets you not have to know a great deal about setting up servers and networks, which is great, because they are very skilled at it when they s…

Well, being an engineer at a company that provides private cloud services and a long-time programmer, I'd wait to ensure that application stays secure before singing the praises of easy.

While I agree that making things more accessible is great, "really understanding the network" and "security" are more important than ever. The types of things happening now are similar to 15 years ago when "developers" were making Access databases that are still around today and are all sorts of a mess. I've seen companies dump tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars just to keep them going.

Now, something similar is happening but it's with web-based applications. Much more exposed. If you don't know your stuff you, your company, or most importantly, your customers will eventually get burned.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#133
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 costi…

As a counterpoint. Truck drivers don't need to know how to build a truck nor to crane operators need technical understanding of the materials in the crane's structure.

Crane operators do need to know a lot more than just pushing buttons. If not, cranes tip over, get blown over, and sometimes people die. I've seen it happen.

Truck drivers, not so much. Although, when your truck breaks down in the middle of nowhere during a blizzard and you have a load where you get paid based on timely delivery, I'd bet having some knowledge on the truck's internals would be helpful.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#134

This got me curious, and I installed one of the official Vagrant images[1]. However they don't seem to come with ZFS as default file system...? [1] https://vagrantcloud.com/freebsd

I expect that for general development use, FreeBSD in a VM performs better with UFS than it does with ZFS, especially in low memory VMs. That is probably why the vagrant images don't use it by default. You might need to just create a FreeBSD VM from the normal FreeBSD installer if you wish to experiment with ZFS on FreeBSD.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#135
post #101
post #8

I recently switched my personal box to FreeBSD. I honestly find it significantly easier to manage than Linux, and have greater trust in its reliability merely from its simplicity. The single biggest thing which stood out for me was PF (from OpenBSD). Anybody who has ever had the grace of managing IPTables on Linux, give PF a go with /etc/pf.conf (docs: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/firewalls-pf.html , my confi…

That PF code is from OpenBSD 4.5, released in May 2009. I wonder what fixes and improvements are missing.

Its a fork that has a different development focus. The biggest difference is that the OpenBSD version has an improved config file format, and the the FreeBSD one supports SMP.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#136
post #15
post #10

Does anyone have a source that FreeBSD are used at Google and Netflix today?

Also WhatsApp

Yahoo! was using FreeBSD machines in production for many years. They were very stable. Since WhatsApp team came out of Yahoo!, they kept using FreeBSD machines.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#137
post #65

(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.) > Many major companies like Google or Netflix use FreeBSD in production. Erm. Well, the company's so huge that I'm sure there's something with some freebsd in it somewhere, but... not really. I've worked with freebsd extensively in a past job, where it was used for licensing reasons. I don't agree with this article.

Yahoo used to run largely on FreeBSD, at least up to the mid 2000s. Wonder whether they still use it.

New machines are using RedHat. Some of the older machines still run FreeBSD.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#138

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 ,…

> There's ezjail [1], but ...

There's also the PC-BSD Warden. With it, one generally does not write scripts to "set up jails, call rctl, set kernel parameters with sysctl".

See the PC-BSD 10.1 Handbook chapter 8:

* http://download.pcbsd.org/iso/10.1-RELEASE/amd64/docs/html/c...

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#139
post #65

(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.) > Many major companies like Google or Netflix use FreeBSD in production. Erm. Well, the company's so huge that I'm sure there's something with some freebsd in it somewhere, but... not really. I've worked with freebsd extensively in a past job, where it was used for licensing reasons. I don't agree with this article.

Yahoo used to run largely on FreeBSD, at least up to the mid 2000s. Wonder whether they still use it.

Enjoy reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558288 .

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could find another OS that give me the same ability to do stuff that OS X does, and it was more open and developer/me friendly, I would switch in a heartbeat. Things that my Mac + OS X gives me, that other I have not found anywhere is includes 10+ hour battery with excellent power-tooling, excellent hardware design that is robust, nice looking and feeling, a desktop environment that works for the most part and l…

> If I could find another OS that give me the same ability to do stuff that OS X does, and it was more open and developer/me friendly, I would switch in a heartbeat. I am using Windows 10 on a surface book. There are some minor glitches in a 1st gen product I admit wholeheartedly. Most are fixed for me. I had a defective unit off lot 0 but the replacement and recent driver updates have fixed everything but the "somet…

This sounds great, except some of us are wary about using an OS with a built-in keylogger and ambient sound recorder.
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