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Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

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Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#3
post #2

I'm halfway through switching all of my personal machines from Linux to BSD for pretty much this exact reason. It's going very well so far.

I wish I could do that but I can't recall any employer that would have allowed that. One of my employer was around 90% Solaris though (10 and 11) over 5000+ hostnames (VMs, zones and physical) and it required very little maintenance, a team of 3 seasoned ops was enough to do everything up to L2/L3.

Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#5
> One of Stefano Marinelli's NetBSD boxes sat quietly serving for a decade, because everyone forgot about it. This is how Unix is meant to be.

I remember someone mentioning they did this with Linux back in 1994 or 1995. Not for a decade obviously but it had been running for at least a year with no reboots or needing maintenance

Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#6
post #4

I feel that “it just works and you don’t need to maintain it” is less an OS feature, and more about what you are doing with it.

I agree. I have had several services run for a decade on a company LAN using Linux. They did boring things well. They will still work in 20 years if the hardware is still there.

Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#8
post #5

> One of Stefano Marinelli's NetBSD boxes sat quietly serving for a decade, because everyone forgot about it. This is how Unix is meant to be. I remember someone mentioning they did this with Linux back in 1994 or 1995. Not for a decade obviously but it had been running for at least a year with no reboots or needing maintenance

There's an order of magnitude difference between running for a year and a decade... That's a lot.

Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#10
A server whose uptime goes to X years is a server that wasn't updated in X years. I'm proud of my old XigmaNAS (FreeBSD) ~15 months uptime years ago that only a blackout did interrupt (yep, I had no UPS), and I write this as a mostly Linux user, but I'm not sure it's a good thing to aim for in production or in anything connected to the Internet.
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