151–156 of 156 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Netflix uses FreeBSD as a major component of its CDN (IIRC, it's the OS on all their CDN nodes).
Most of the CDN isn't served by open connect but by real CDN like Akamai.
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…
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…
Sorry if I'm too harsh, but saying that ZoL is "rock solid" and "production ready" sounds like a joke to my ears. ZFS is an extremely complex filesystem, and it took Sun _years_ of internal testing first, and hundreds of angry customers later (sadly, at some point, the only way to improve a product is through real world testing), to reach a milestone where it was really production ready. I know that on these days of…
It depends of course, I would always choose FreeBSD over Linux when it comes to ZFS, but then again I would always choose a BSD-OS regardless of whether I want to use ZFS or not.
Take it certainly with a grain of salt, but the developers themselves announced ZoL to be production ready in 2013/03[1], Richard Yao (also a developer of ZoL) argued in a blog post in 2014/09[2] that ZoL was stable and production ready and elaborated on this. Some interesting comments also are here[3].
And all this also was quite a while ago, ZoL has been used by users for years now, it's come a long way, I have used it to some extent a while ago and had no bad experiences.
In the end everyone has to decide for themselves what "production ready" really means, and how high the threshold is to deserve that label. But I think that you can reasonably make the argument, that it is...
[1] https://groups.google.com/a/zfsonlinux.org/forum/m/?fromgrou...
[2] https://clusterhq.com/2014/09/11/state-zfs-on-linux/
[3] http://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/09/11/1421201/the-state-o...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the CDN isn't served by open connect but by real CDN like Akamai.
That used to be the case, but Netflix started building out their own CDN a few years ago and they've migrated away from their legacy providers. Netflix is now serving about a third of US peak time internet traffic from FreeBSD.
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 ...…
Honest question: has FreeBSD become more automation friendly? i.e. putting all the configuration in /etc/rc.conf may be nice for a systems administrator manually editing things, but makes it hard for installation scripts which configure the system incrementally (e.g. Ansible). One thing I like about Linux is support for /etc/foo.d directories instead of /etc/foo.conf. Or is this not a problem in practice? In our new…
The OpenBSD people have a while back (http://www.openbsd.org/plus56.html) explicitly re-defined /etc/rc.conf{,.local} to be a database of name=value pairs (rather than a shell script with arbitrary content), precisely so that it can be manipulated and parsed by programs other than shells. They have the rcctl tool (http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man8/...) which is explicitly designed to let one do things like
rcctl enable ntpd
rcctl disable ntpd
Whilst FreeBSD has yet to catch up with the formality, the existence of tools such as sysrc (https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sysrc) mean that treating FreeBSD /etc/rc.conf{,.local} (and indeed other files that can be manipulated with sysrc such as /boot/loader.conf) as a similar database file is a growing idiom, FreeNAS becoming the exception and not the rule in this regard.
Services managed on FreeBSD through nosh (http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwa...) have the advantage that they can use the daemontools envdir mechanism, which separates configuration variables for separate services quite simply and easily. This is a long-standing and well-understood mechanism, which has been around for approaching two decades at this point and which one can find widely discussed and documented. nosh has a mechanism for importing /etc/rc.conf{,.local}, moreover.
In nosh there is also an rcctl shim that maps both to this envdir mechanism and to the native service management. So one can do the same rcctl things such as
%rcctl get ntpd flags
-p /var/run/ntpd.pid -f /var/db/ntpd.drift
%
rcctl enable ntpd
rcctl disable ntpd
I've been using FreeBSD since 1999 or so, and I love it, but not really for a desktop. On a server you can spend a lot of time dialing it in, building from source, etc. and have a rock solid performant server, and in most cases it's worth it. On the desktop you can get a system that's basically the same as Linux but you will spend more time on updates and building stuff, and it will be harder to configure your hardwa…
So... what then do you prefer for your desktop?