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Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

theregister.com

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

#21

Post by boricj »

I'm currently building my homelab and I'm seriously considering SmartOS as a hypervisor.

I've never used Solaris or illumos before, but I'm looking for something bullet-proof, idiot-proof and maintenance-free. The mainstream solution would probably be Proxmox and while I know how to administrate a Debian system, I don't trust myself as a sysadmin while acting in a personal capacity. Proxmox intrinsically just doesn't bring the peace of mind that I won't accidentally blow it up while away from my apartment.

Just because a solution isn't mainstream doesn't mean it's not worth taking a look at. Even if you don't end up selecting them, it brings a healthy perspective that you wouldn't have otherwise.

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

#22

Post by nxicvyvy »

steeleduncan wrote: post #13
jl6 wrote: 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.

Yes, the most concrete issue the article mentions is losing data on Btrfs, but that is well known to be a flaky, semi-experimental file system, the operating system has very little to do with it. The equivalent would be running Debian on ext4 Also, the article mentions Kubernetes a few times, which quite fairly has a reputation for massive complexity, but is again entirely optional, and a piece of software entirely s…

It's also a 10 years out of date complaint. Btrfs has been stable for fucking ages. That meme needs to die.

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

#23

Post by [deleted] »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #19
jimnotgym wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair I've had Debian boxes with uptimes of many years and service lives of a decade. A sarge install doing nothing but DNS (on metal not VM) from 2006 lasted until 2015. So it isn't just a Linux - BSD thing it's a mindset of simplicity and focus of function. But since about 2020 my love for Debian waned, what with the systemd and ugly internal politics. Nowadays I'm inclined to look at whether a BSD or other op…

[deleted]

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

#24

Post by appendix-rock »

I don’t buy this article.

> Clients are often influenced by hype. A few years ago, it was "Linux is a toy." Now, it's "Why bhyve and not Proxmox?" They ask, "How can they sell FreeBSD? There's no AI, there's no Cloud, there's no Kubernetes, there's no blockchain – there's nothing!"

I am very confident that this is more ‘fan fiction’ than the author would like to admit. The sort of hypothetical that someone cooks up on their head to anger up the blood and to then self-soothe by thinking about how much better than everyone else they are.

Why does everything have to be so bloody religious? If you like boring tech, stop politicising it.

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

#25

Post by kleiba »

squarefoot wrote: post #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.

Why do updates necessarily require reboots though?

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

#26

Post by swiftcoder »

hk1337 wrote: 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

The problem with a box that has been running the same critical service for years on end, is that nobody knows if it would actually boot back up successfully in the event of a reboot/crash/power cut/etc...

I inherited administration over a number of one-off critical linux systems back in ~2010 that had 6+ years of uptime. Spent a long time analysing their contents, and then building replacement stacks with redundancy alongside them, and carefully cutting traffic across...

At the end of the day, you need to be able to reboot/upgrade servers regularly (even if you don't in practice do it very often).

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

#27

Post by Ygg2 »

nxicvyvy wrote: post #22
steeleduncan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the most concrete issue the article mentions is losing data on Btrfs, but that is well known to be a flaky, semi-experimental file system, the operating system has very little to do with it. The equivalent would be running Debian on ext4 Also, the article mentions Kubernetes a few times, which quite fairly has a reputation for massive complexity, but is again entirely optional, and a piece of software entirely s…

It's also a 10 years out of date complaint. Btrfs has been stable for fucking ages. That meme needs to die.

Whenever topic of FS arises, I always hear anecdata that btrfs/ext4 lost data and ZFS was smooth sailing.

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

#28

Post by BSDobelix »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #14
squarefoot wrote: post #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.

Yeah, the article links another post which talks about a machine with a 9 year uptime as if it's a good thing. 9 years without a NetBSD release update (or kernel upgrade) is not something to be proud of.

>9 years without a NetBSD release update (or kernel upgrade) is not something to be proud of.

Not every system has to be connected to the internet....imagine that ;)

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

#29

Post by nxicvyvy »

Ygg2 wrote: post #27
nxicvyvy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a 10 years out of date complaint. Btrfs has been stable for fucking ages. That meme needs to die.

Whenever topic of FS arises, I always hear anecdata that btrfs/ext4 lost data and ZFS was smooth sailing.

Yes and not a single one of them can quote someone from this decade because it's a shitty internet myth that won't die.

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

#30

Post by BSDobelix »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #9

Every companies have linux servers with crazy uptimes. My server never crash, my linux desktop do. I assume they don't put BSD on their client's laptop.

If you need a stable desktop put z/OS on it, you normally don't reboot those til the end of the systems lifetime.
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