Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 91 posts

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

#61

Post by kemotep »

eru wrote: post #42
swiftcoder wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even restoring from the latest backups, running the two in parallel as you hand off the services and then shutdown the old one. You confirm that backups work, and that deploying the service is still well documented/automations work.

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

#62

Post by BSDobelix »

bionsystem wrote: post #40
BSDobelix wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> If you need a stable desktop put z/OS on it You mean use a mainframe remotely ?

Now that you say it, that would probably the simpler way.

Or use MVS TK5 ;)

https://www.prince-webdesign.nl/index.php/software/mvs-3-8j-...

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

#63

Post by BSDobelix »

timc3 wrote: post #57
boricj wrote: post #21

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…

I’ve run SmartOS, but mainly use OmniOS. As with all these, they are very good but make sure to run them on supported hardware. They have good documentation, very small community, and if you run into problems then debugging them is very possible - but not for the technically challenged. OmniOS I basically run as an appliance and has been trouble free since the start.

OmniOS is a incredible good illumos distribution, i think Oxide build their internal distribution with OmniOS as the "base".

illumos Distribution comparison:

https://illumos.org/docs/about/distro/

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

#64

Post by BSDobelix »

viraptor wrote: post #56
BSDobelix wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ;)

In the post describing that server: > They required a dhcp, an internal DNS, an Apache + PHP server for some internal (and a couple of external) websites, a file server accessible via both NFS and Samba (as Windows PCs needed access), an internal SMTP connecting to an external relay to ensure faster email dispatches for employees given their unstable connectivity, and a few other nuances. It's running basically every…

I don't talk about this case, but the automatic assumption that every system is connected to a common network.

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

#65

Post by jmrm »

After reading the article and the comments, I sincerely don't know why use BSD outside programming a server software that use `pledge()` and `jail()` system calls, like when people make [BCHS servers](https://learnbchs.org/index.html).

Maybe I'm biased because I had worse experience making FreeBSD and OpenBSD in a desktop than with Gentoo, but I think working Modern Linux distros are as customizable, as stable, and with a lot more community and professionals working on them than any BSD one, and with a business in mind, that last detail is really important.

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

#66

Post by parkcedar »

BSDobelix wrote: post #59
parkcedar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>but it’s a vastly different kernel (derived from the Mach microkernel). XNU is a combination of a FreeBSD-Kernel (Networking, Filesystem, etc) and a Mach-Kernel (scheduling, ipc, virtual-memory etc): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7GMHB3Plc8

Yes, but since it was initially created I believe a lot of it has been rewritten. Eg, the filesystem. I suspect the memory system is different these days too, since macOS handles compressed memory quite differently (though not sure how that gets implemented under the hood).

FreeBSD is like a great grandparent, related but still very different.

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

#67

Post by parkcedar »

sph wrote: post #60
parkcedar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No one really cares about the kernel internals, its origin or the license of it. What is prominent is the user-space components (i.e. shell and other binaries). macOS is closer to other BSDs than Linux is, as Linux usually ships with GNU libs and utilities.

You hardly notice the binaries though, especially since gnu cmd line utils are so similar anyway. You’d expect the c libs to be similar, but they’re not really (about as different as Mac to Linux anyway).

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

#68

Post by RALaBarge »

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.

Proxmox runs on top of Debian by default, which is a fun and easy way to increase the layers of abstraction. All of my homelab stuff, my DNS server, and different things run on Proxmox, running on an old T430 on my bookshelf.

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

#69

Post by bauruine »

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.

I have a broken (parent transid verify failed on logical) btrfs RAID5 here that I can't mount anymore even with the recovery commands and google shows many results about it from less than a decade ago.

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

#70

Post by le-mark »

Reminds me of a new cto who, coming from a windows server background, demanded we reboot the servers (Linux) to prepare for the holiday rush (e-commerce site, mid oughts). Our admins had to explain we don’t do that. He persisted, so the admins stayed late and then went for beers, not rebooting a thing. Iirc this was outside of a maintenance window, and it simply wasn’t necessary.
Post reply on HN