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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

#171

Post by curt15 »

AnonC wrote: post #168
lproven wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who admins a lot of btrfs, it seems very unlikely that this was unrecoverable. As someone who used it all day every day in my day job for 4 years, I find it 100% believable. I am not saying you're wrong: I'm saying, experiences differ widely, and your patterns of use are not be universal. It's the single most unreliable untrustworthy filesystem I've used in the 21st century.

> It's the single most unreliable untrustworthy filesystem I've used in the 21st century. I think the “experiences differ widely” point makes sense with this comment too. Synology uses btrfs on the NAS systems it sells (there’s probably some option to choose another filesystem, but this is the default, AFAIK). If it were to be “the most unreliable untrustworthy filesystem” for many others too, Synology would’ve (or s…

Synology only uses btrfs in single-disk mode and implements RAID-1 functionality using its own patched version of mdadm to side-step the gotchas of native btrfs raid1.

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

#172

Post by SubjectToChange »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #145
thoroughburro wrote: post #130

> The largest failure was with btrfs — after a reboot, a 50 TB filesystem (in mirror, for backups) simply stopped working. No more mounting possible. Data was lost, but I had further backups. The client was informed and understood the situation. Within a few days, the server was rebuilt from scratch on FreeBSD with ZFS — since then, I haven’t lost a single bit. As someone who admins a lot of btrfs, it seems very unli…

Why do people use btrfs and similar filesystems for production use? They are by no means dumpster fires. But the internet is littered with stories of "X happened, then I realized Y & that I wasn't getting my data back"

Facebook (well, Meta, I guess) is famously a big user and developer of btrfs. It seems to work just fine for them.

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

#173

Post by sangnoir »

I love it when the answer to a question posed in a headline is provided in the second sentence of the article.

> I’m the founder and Barista of the BSD Cafe, a community of *BSD enthusiasts

Did the original article change it's title (currently "I Solve Problems"), or did the submitter editorialize it?

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

#174

Post by ornornor »

nucleardog wrote: post #146
graemep wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tend to use FreeBSD because in many ways it is simpler and less surprising, especially when accounting for the passage of time. ifconfig is still ifconfig, and it works great. rc.d is all I need for my own stuff. That sounds very appealing to me. I have to keep a small number of servers running, but its not my main focus and I would like to spend as little time on it as possible. I have started using Alpine Linux f…

The UI generally quite stable and well documented, which is awesome. They also have things like `rpm` in ports that you can install. Why? Because you can enable linux binary compatibility[0] and run linux binaries on it (this implements the linux kernel interface, it's not a VM/emulator). It's also backward compatible with its own binaries back to FreeBSD 4 (circa 2000). Though you may not need that as the ports/pack…

> Really, the only reason I'm not running it everywhere is that the industry has kind of settled on linux-style containers for... absolutely everything, and the current solution for that on FreeBSD is basically "run linux in a VM".

That, and the wifi situation on laptops.

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

#175

Post by [deleted] »

nucleardog wrote: post #146
graemep wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tend to use FreeBSD because in many ways it is simpler and less surprising, especially when accounting for the passage of time. ifconfig is still ifconfig, and it works great. rc.d is all I need for my own stuff. That sounds very appealing to me. I have to keep a small number of servers running, but its not my main focus and I would like to spend as little time on it as possible. I have started using Alpine Linux f…

The UI generally quite stable and well documented, which is awesome. They also have things like `rpm` in ports that you can install. Why? Because you can enable linux binary compatibility[0] and run linux binaries on it (this implements the linux kernel interface, it's not a VM/emulator). It's also backward compatible with its own binaries back to FreeBSD 4 (circa 2000). Though you may not need that as the ports/pack…

[deleted]

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

#176

Post by nosioptar »

globular-toast wrote: post #58
binkHN wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Notably Gentoo. Any others?

PCLinuxOS (a Mandrake/Mandriva fork) uses SysV.

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

#177

Post by graemep »

nucleardog wrote: post #146
graemep wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tend to use FreeBSD because in many ways it is simpler and less surprising, especially when accounting for the passage of time. ifconfig is still ifconfig, and it works great. rc.d is all I need for my own stuff. That sounds very appealing to me. I have to keep a small number of servers running, but its not my main focus and I would like to spend as little time on it as possible. I have started using Alpine Linux f…

The UI generally quite stable and well documented, which is awesome. They also have things like `rpm` in ports that you can install. Why? Because you can enable linux binary compatibility[0] and run linux binaries on it (this implements the linux kernel interface, it's not a VM/emulator). It's also backward compatible with its own binaries back to FreeBSD 4 (circa 2000). Though you may not need that as the ports/pack…

Thanks. I have been thinking about it for a while, but have never made the leap to using it. Mostly I am running pretty small and simple servers, and do not really need Linux style containers.

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

#178

Post by traceroute66 »

SubjectToChange wrote: post #172
sidewndr46 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people use btrfs and similar filesystems for production use? They are by no means dumpster fires. But the internet is littered with stories of "X happened, then I realized Y & that I wasn't getting my data back"

Facebook (well, Meta, I guess) is famously a big user and developer of btrfs. It seems to work just fine for them.

> Facebook (well, Meta, I guess) is famously a big user and developer of btrfs. It seems to work just fine for them

I really, really, really wish people would STOP with the whole "it works for $SilconValleyCorp so it must work for me" or "$SiliconValleyCorp does it, so I must".

It only leads to disappointment in the case of the former and wholly un-necessary over-engineering in the case of the latter.

    (a) You do not know *how* or *where* Facebook use BTRFS
    (b) Even in the unlikely event they use it "everywhere", they have far more redundancy on every layer than you will ever have.  So they don't care if a random BTRFS instance borks itself.
    (c) Facebook probably employ the guy who invented BTRFS and an army of kernel developers on top of that .... how much in-house support do you have for BTRFS ?
As far as I am concerned, the fact that they STILL have not fixed RAID5 in BTRFS says everythng you need to know.

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

#179

Post by badsectoracula »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #145
thoroughburro wrote: post #130

> The largest failure was with btrfs — after a reboot, a 50 TB filesystem (in mirror, for backups) simply stopped working. No more mounting possible. Data was lost, but I had further backups. The client was informed and understood the situation. Within a few days, the server was rebuilt from scratch on FreeBSD with ZFS — since then, I haven’t lost a single bit. As someone who admins a lot of btrfs, it seems very unli…

Why do people use btrfs and similar filesystems for production use? They are by no means dumpster fires. But the internet is littered with stories of "X happened, then I realized Y & that I wasn't getting my data back"

Btrfs has some nice features - e.g. compression and snapshots, which i didn't knew i'd even like before using them. Not only they have saved me a few times from bad updates ("saved" in the sense that i was able to pretty much instantly revert, it saved time, i wouldn't lose anything even without btrfs), but they also help with things like "i'm going to run this script to process 29837894293 files - and the script might have some bugs in it, so i want to be sure i wont lose anything" (i.e. make snapshot, run script, check results, compare snapshot with current state to ensure nothing is lost, delete snapshot). Snapshots are also useful for diffing FS state, e.g. before and after installing some program.

As for the stories, AFAICT often the reason is that the user didn't know they could get their data back - or they are stories from many years ago when btrfs was buggy, but AFAIK those issues have been long solved (i think some specific case with some RAID setup still has issues but this is hearsay and AFAICT from the same hearsay, that setup isn't really necessary with btrfs in the first place).

Using btrfs is more complicated than using ext or something similar, especially since most tools that deal with files/filesystems are made only with ext-like features in mind - to the point where sometimes i wonder what the point is and i'm considering switching to ext3 or ext4, but then i remember snapshots and i'm like, nah :-P.

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