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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

#91

Post by oarsinsync »

inopinatus wrote: post #41
mmooss wrote: 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…

> This was in 2010, by which time any ISP that wasn't operating as amateur hour had the tools for all these things.

Agreed. Also consider that shared hosting packages are very much providers scraping the bottom of the barrel for some marginal extra revenue. Shared hosting customers are not the highest priority of customers, unless your entire business is based around shared hosting (in which case, you are likely operating as amateur hour anyway)

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

#92

Post by rcbdev »

jwildeboer wrote: post #61

"As an experiment, I decided to migrate two hosts (each with about 10 VMs) of a client — where I had full control—without telling them, over a weekend." And that's where I draw the line. Abusing the trust of your customers is an absolute no-no in my book.

> Abusing the trust of your customers

Yes. I also always let my customers sign off when I change the libraries I use. Completely sane approach.

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

#93

Post by sylware »

I really wanted to give a try to FreeBSD... because I thought it was linux from "better" times... and then I saw they are tied to the tons of similar gcc extensions... and then I say to myself "why bother since it has the same major compiler dependency issue", better try to fix linux code base or start from there.

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

#94

Post by kortilla »

vfclists wrote: 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…

The current generation of Americans are absolutely rich enough to just get food and have shelter. The ones that struggle are the ones that want to live in popular cities precisely because of the available improvements beyond shelter and food.

The houses of the 50s were shit tier and spread around the entire US. You can go buy them today for cheap in the 98% of locations people don’t want to live in.

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

#95

Post by blueflow »

INTPenis wrote: post #76
DeathArrow wrote: post #59

All is fine and dandy and BSDs can solve many use cases. Unfortunately for the solution we are working on, which imply many microservices we need Kubernetes and no BSD equivalent to Kubernetes exists.

Can't you just run k8s on bsd? You might have to build and maintain your own release of it, but I'm sure someone has done it already.

The BSD's don't have the namespaces/unshare syscall functionality like Linux does.

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

#96

Post by dspillett »

jbverschoor wrote: post #57
kopirgan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> I always used PostgreSQL even though most were on MySQL

That far back mysql and postgres were not even close to being a like-for-like comparison. One was a proper database, with things like referential integrity and a type system that didn't count the 31st of February to be a valid date, and the other was a glorified ndbm with some structure, a SQL interface, and was very very fast at running simple single-table SELECT statements.

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

#97

Post by blueflow »

draga79 wrote: post #67
jwildeboer wrote: post #61

"As an experiment, I decided to migrate two hosts (each with about 10 VMs) of a client — where I had full control—without telling them, over a weekend." And that's where I draw the line. Abusing the trust of your customers is an absolute no-no in my book.

Not an abuse at all. I've a contract with those clients, and I can move the VMs, change the services, etc. freely as long as it doesn't cost more than the amount we've previously set. Otherwise, I'd never dare to do something like that.

If it is infrastructure that is critical to your company, you do not want your hoster to run experiments on it.

Its also a legal nightmare for the hoster if something goes wrong.

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

#98

Post by hggigg »

kev009 wrote: post #83
DeathArrow wrote: post #59

All is fine and dandy and BSDs can solve many use cases. Unfortunately for the solution we are working on, which imply many microservices we need Kubernetes and no BSD equivalent to Kubernetes exists.

I've helped build two top 10 service provider networks (10s of Tbps). One on FreeBSD, and one on Linux with Kubernetes. I don't really see Kubernetes as being a game changer. The biggest pro, it makes it easier to onboard both development and operations personnel having a quasi-standard for how a lot of things like scheduling and application networking work. But it also seems to come with a magnitude of accidental an…

Agree with this on all points.

We went from a virtualized server model to managed Kubernetes and costs have escalated considerably. The additional complexity and maintenance overheads of Kubernetes are not trivial and required additional staff hires just to keep things ticking. I think the cost so far from moving from two cages in separate datacentres running blades to AWS is approximately a 6x multiplier including staff. This was all driven on the back of "we must have microservices to scale", something we have failed entirely to do. It's a complete own goal.

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

#99

Post by 8fingerlouie »

pjmlp wrote: post #48

Fidonet, it was been a while since I saw that.

I still remember discovering FidoNet sometime in the 90s.

It was a time where sending regular mail to different countries could take weeks, and cross country phonecalls would cost between $2 and $20 per minute, and here was FidoNet that promised to allow communications across the globe with only 1-4 days delay and basically for free.

My 15-18 year old self was instantly sold. I spent countless hours reading through the "forums" on there. So much knowledge just at the tip of my fingers.

Of course some time later it was more or less replaced (for me) by email, usenet and IRC, but the memory still remains.

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

#100

Post by hggigg »

cientifico wrote: post #85
kev009 wrote: post #79

I use Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all for fun, learning, and profit(the first two). At the very least it is nice to make acquaintance with at least one BSD because it will probably expand your knowledge on Linux in ways you wont be able to anticipate. For example, FreeBSD got me into kernel development, full system debugging, network stack development, driver development, and understanding how the whole kit f…

I completely agree! If you're looking to deeply understand how Linux works under the hood, I highly recommend trying out Linux From Scratch. It gave me invaluable insight into the system, especially when I first explored it 20 years ago. Building everything from the ground up—without relying on prepackaged distros or libc—was a game changer. Check it out: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

I ran through that about 10 years ago. Not difficult for a reasonably seasoned Unixy person to run through but it quite frankly scared the shit out of me on the basis of how much stuff requires patching and hacking. Nothing fits together nicely. It gave me a whole new appreciation of macOS and FreeBSD.
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