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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

#41

Post by eru »

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.

There's another reason to restart all your stuff (computers, server processes, etc) every so often:

In case something goes wrong, you might have to restart anyway. So you better exercise that process to know it works. Also, I'd rather get really good at dealing with the first day of uptime of a system, then discover what the n-th day brings for ever larger values of n for the first time ever.

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

#42

Post by eru »

swiftcoder wrote: post #26
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…

Yes, you should semi-regularly restart everything (both OS and server processes), so you know you can bring them back up.

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

#43

Post by bionsystem »

28304283409234 wrote: post #35

All the home-server setups of my colleagues are tiny Kubernetes setups in various ways. Breaking down in various ways. Mine is a Debian box. Upgraded from Debian 10 to 11 to 12. Running all kinds of things. I only use Debian packages alongside one or two Docker containers. Linux can do boring just fine.

Debian is incredible and I think there is a lot of mutual respect between both communities (debian and freebsd ; debian is even the default choice for the linux compatibility layer). I wish Debian GNU/kFreeBSD would be a thing...

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

#44

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

bionsystem wrote: post #43
28304283409234 wrote: post #35

All the home-server setups of my colleagues are tiny Kubernetes setups in various ways. Breaking down in various ways. Mine is a Debian box. Upgraded from Debian 10 to 11 to 12. Running all kinds of things. I only use Debian packages alongside one or two Docker containers. Linux can do boring just fine.

Debian is incredible and I think there is a lot of mutual respect between both communities (debian and freebsd ; debian is even the default choice for the linux compatibility layer). I wish Debian GNU/kFreeBSD would be a thing...

Debian is the FreeBSD of the Linuxes, and FreeBSD is the Debian of the BSDs.

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

#45

Post by georgyo »

28304283409234 wrote: post #31

From the blog post linked in the article: > The largest failure was with btrfs — after a reboot, a 50 TB filesystem (in mirror, for backups) simply stopped working. RAID is not a backup.

Agreed, raid is not backup.

But restoring 50TB of data from actual backups take a lot of time.

I like BTRFS to a fair degree, but thae fact that _any_ two drives failing in its "raid 10" configuration causes data loss is not obvious or intuitive.

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

#46

Post by timc3 »

28304283409234 wrote: post #31

From the blog post linked in the article: > The largest failure was with btrfs — after a reboot, a 50 TB filesystem (in mirror, for backups) simply stopped working. RAID is not a backup.

It sounded to me more like the system was being used for Backups, not that they expect RAID to be a backup.

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

#47

Post by viraptor »

nxicvyvy wrote: post #29
Ygg2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also everyone ignores the publicly visible zfs repo/issues. Corruption https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16631 crash/corruption https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16626 crash https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16623 just from this week. One of those filesystems is likely more stable than the other, but the image of perfect zfs is tiring.

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

#48

Post by gtvwill »

swiftcoder wrote: post #26
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…

I just spent the last 4 days recovering payroll systems and data from machines that have no backup. Turns out they were storing all the payroll data on an external hdd in a folder called "dead hdd recovery" that was from the last time I recovered a dead system for them about 4 years ago. They weren't ment to keep using that external hdd or folder but they did. They also weren't interested in other forms of redundancy the last time the payroll machine died.

This time however the building had a fire go through the main office and took out a quarter of the facility. I finally convinced them to atleast get the data on one drive for a start.

First fire they'd had in 40 years of operating. I still can't convince them to switch to a cloud based payroll/book keeping system but hey atleast it's now backed up across two terminals, one that's kept offsite and a 3rd location of onedrive in the cloud. It's been a fun few days to say the least.

Astounded the drives survived whilst their chassis melted around them (samsung ssds and asus pn51-e1 mini pcs). They got insanely lucky.

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

#49

Post by technothrasher »

kstenerud wrote: post #37

I've also read the original blog that this article spawns from. The gist of it is: "I switched to BSD during Linux's bad period, and now I'm comfortable with it so I'll stick with it". And hey, more power to you. But the thing is, the world has moved on. Linux is stable now. Linux containerization and VM tech is good now. The storage technologies are cross-platform now (I've had zero data loss since using zfs). The m…

> the world has moved on

This is exactly why I migrated my systems to Linux. I still prefer BSD honestly, having "grown up" with SunOS and then moving to FreeBSD very early, it's where I'm most comfortable. But it started to get so that it was noticably harder to keep my software up to date and functioning on BSD when it is often an afterthought for many projects now, or only supported by third party work.

I may not like it (in fact, I don't) but Linux is definitely the easier path for most things these days.

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

#50

Post by parkcedar »

kstenerud wrote: post #37

I've also read the original blog that this article spawns from. The gist of it is: "I switched to BSD during Linux's bad period, and now I'm comfortable with it so I'll stick with it". And hey, more power to you. But the thing is, the world has moved on. Linux is stable now. Linux containerization and VM tech is good now. The storage technologies are cross-platform now (I've had zero data loss since using zfs). The m…

Mac isn’t really BSD, it’s a common misconception. It shares some of the userland code, but it’s a vastly different kernel (derived from the Mach microkernel). The userland has diverged quite significantly now too. Though, I guess it probably is closer to BSD than Linux
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