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Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

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Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#51
post #5

> “If nothing is working, what am I paying you for? If everything’s working, what am I paying you for?” Bloke is not acquainted with Keynesian economics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OhIdDNtSv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO_tTnpof_o All a man needs is food in his stomach and a place to rest at the end of the day. Everything else is vanity What proportion of global GDP is dedicated to fulfilling our basic mat…

> I would work for myself, following my own philosophy. Sounds like he understood it just fine. He owns the means of production.

He only works for himself only if he gets a steady income stream so long as the systems he manages stay up, which I'm sure he doesn't.

There is a reason for the "you will own nothing and you will be happy" ideology being promoted by "PTB", ie subscriptions for ink cartridges, heated seats and advanced suspensions in newer cars.

Corporations now want a continuous income stream from the services provide by physical products they have "sold", but they don't want their employees and subcontractors from earning some of that income stream.

Some IT administrators have been know to schedule regular "downtimes" on perfectly performing systems just to ensure their users and bosses don't take their service for granted.

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#52

I switched from FreeBSD to Linux, mainly because of the bad Java support and the simple fact that Linux became way more popular, which added to the difference in software availability.

FreeBSD has pretty good Java support? Sure if there is a new LTS release it takes a couple of months before it is ported to FreeBSD but that's about it?

For a long time they didn't have any. I recall from mid 90s version 4+? They were still trying to port.. or was it early 2000s lol either way it's ancient history

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook runs their entire stack using Btrfs [0]. I would encourage anyone who is stuck in the "oh btrfs is so buggy and loses data" mindset (not helped by articles like this [1] that play off btrfs as some half-baked contraption, when it's really btrfs raid that needs a LOT more time to bake) to look into things and realize that large companies (OpenSuse, Redhat, Faceboook) have poured a lot of time to get it to wor…

Meta does a lot of things that don't scale for reliable/trustworthy systems and aren't suitable for all use-cases. (I also used to work there too.) ZFS is only reliable where it was battled-tested: on Solaris. ZoL has been infinitely tinkered with and smashed up that it's nothing like running a Thumper as a NAS. XFS + mdadm on Linux is, without a doubt, far more reliable than ZoL. Ask me how I know. I have the scars…

tell me your story

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#54
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems reasonable to me: ... This site and this directory were driving up server load averages, which causes instability for all users on this server. Our block on this site appears to have blocked over 150,000 connections in about half an hour. This is simply more than is appropriate for a shared server. You may want to review your domain's traffic logs to see what kind of traffic this site is getting. The logs for t…

Sure, it's reasonable, if your desired outcome is to lose a customer by a) demonstrating a lack of burst or headroom capacity and/or graceful degradation/priority scheduling capability, and b) being a dick about it. Alternatively one may intervene with a positive approach and framing viz. "we have temporarily [provisioned additional capacity / relocated your storage to another spindle / mirrored your content to a les…

In many industries it's standard practice to cause pain to one customer to avoid causing pain to all of them. If you've ever had work done on your house, a small guy who overruns will often bail out on your job ( and reschedule) rather than slip all the other customers he had lined up. so I can see why this guy decided to disable a directory rather than all the other customers in the server have slow service

The issue is that the economics are different: a roofer doesn't earn more by doing one big job than 4 small ones in the same time. But a big user is a better economic prospect to a service provider than the small ones. That's why this was clearly a dumb move

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hard to know the timeline with his data loss, but I am assuming it was a long time ago. XFS is originally from SGI Irix and was designed to run on higher end hardware. SGI donated it to Linux in 1999 and it carried a lot of its assumptions over. For example on SGI boxes you had "hardware raid" with cache, which essentially is a sort of embedded computer with it's own memory. That cache had a battery backup so that…

Facebook runs their entire stack using Btrfs [0]. I would encourage anyone who is stuck in the "oh btrfs is so buggy and loses data" mindset (not helped by articles like this [1] that play off btrfs as some half-baked contraption, when it's really btrfs raid that needs a LOT more time to bake) to look into things and realize that large companies (OpenSuse, Redhat, Faceboook) have poured a lot of time to get it to wor…

I use btrfs a lot but I'm not sure if I'd use it for production servers. The I/O bandwidth is just a lot lower and I get weird latency problems on desktop Linux when BTRFS is very busy that I don't get on other file systems. Then again, I probably wouldn't use ZFS for anything but a NAS setup either.

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#56

I switched from FreeBSD to Linux, mainly because of the bad Java support and the simple fact that Linux became way more popular, which added to the difference in software availability.

FreeBSD has pretty good Java support? Sure if there is a new LTS release it takes a couple of months before it is ported to FreeBSD but that's about it?

There was Java, but only green threads were supported. I was running Java/J2EE apps (on resin).

I also recall a problem with mmap() but I’m not sure if it was related to Java or something else

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD has pretty good Java support? Sure if there is a new LTS release it takes a couple of months before it is ported to FreeBSD but that's about it?

For a long time they didn't have any. I recall from mid 90s version 4+? They were still trying to port.. or was it early 2000s lol either way it's ancient history

Yeah I started around 4.something until 6 I believe. After that it was all Debian.

My lesson was to just use what moet people use. But then again, I always used PostgreSQL even though most were on MySQL

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#58
post #46

All I can say is experiences differ. I'm a long time Debian user, and now use FreeBSD for work. Both are far better than the proprietary competition, but I'd take Debian/Linux over FreeBSD when building a random server. To give but one example, I recently reported a bug when FreeBSD didn't boot after upgrade from 13 to 14. Worse the disk format was somehow altered so when the reboot tried to boot off 13 due to zfs bo…

There is more than one Linux distribution that's designed to work without systemd.

Notably Gentoo. Any others?

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook runs their entire stack using Btrfs [0]. I would encourage anyone who is stuck in the "oh btrfs is so buggy and loses data" mindset (not helped by articles like this [1] that play off btrfs as some half-baked contraption, when it's really btrfs raid that needs a LOT more time to bake) to look into things and realize that large companies (OpenSuse, Redhat, Faceboook) have poured a lot of time to get it to wor…

Meta does a lot of things that don't scale for reliable/trustworthy systems and aren't suitable for all use-cases. (I also used to work there too.) ZFS is only reliable where it was battled-tested: on Solaris. ZoL has been infinitely tinkered with and smashed up that it's nothing like running a Thumper as a NAS. XFS + mdadm on Linux is, without a doubt, far more reliable than ZoL. Ask me how I know. I have the scars…

Did you or other XFS users try out stratis?
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