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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

#81

Post by krick »

appendix-rock wrote: post #24

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 o…

Yeah, as if Linux has AI and Blockchain and these don't exist on BSD systems...

Admittedly, Linux really isn't boring enough for me. By boring I mean I don't really want to notice that OS exists, I want a distro that has most answers to any noob question on Google, all drivers for all hardware out of the box, no fancy package managers like snap or cool future technology like ZFS, no way to shoot myself in the foot however hard I try... But in fact almost all cool future technology comes to Linux from BSD, but it has less drivers, less packets, and googling yields less results. Everything else is pretty much the same everywhere and always comes with caveats.

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

#82

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

lproven wrote: post #71
nxicvyvy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hi. Article author here. I worked for SUSE from 2017 to 2021. Because of that, I ran openSUSE on my work computer. Btrfs self-destructed on me, on 3 different PCs, about twice a year in that 4-year period. Not myth. Not from t'Internet. Direct personal experience. Btrfs `df` lies. You, and programs, can't get an accurate estimate of free space. OS snapshots fill the volume, volume corrupts, new install time. Over and…

Yah well. Do some housekeeping then? I mean if the Distro delivers automagically snapshotting in intervals, during installation of packages, or whatever they fancy?

It's not like you'd need those for all eternity. By housekeeping I meant deleting them from time to time, with easily clickable tools, which exist(now/meanwhile), and DO give an overview. Maybe have to 'rebalance' afterwards, which can go wrong if the 'housekeeping' was too late, or something. OTOH the 'rebalancing' can be automated, from the beginning.

I'm sure similar haphazards (regarding common tools like df/du not being able to give an exact overview of remaining capacity) exist under ZFS, at least when your'e using compression.

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

#83

Post by eru »

kemotep wrote: post #61
eru wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, the only backups you can count on working are those you practice restoring from.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

BSDobelix wrote: post #64
viraptor wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by Ygg2 »

viraptor wrote: post #47
nxicvyvy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> One of those filesystems is likely more stable than the other, but the image of perfect zfs is tiring.

I didn't say perfect, I just said, querying for FS to use, everyone recommends ZFS, over Btrfs. Even if not perfect, it seems to have left a better impression than Btrfs.

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

#87

Post by 28304283409234 »

georgyo wrote: post #45
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.

If one has 50TB(!!) of mission critical data, one should not store it on one machine running btrfs. That is just silly. No many how many mirrors you throw at it.

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

#88

Post by lproven »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #82
lproven wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. Article author here. I worked for SUSE from 2017 to 2021. Because of that, I ran openSUSE on my work computer. Btrfs self-destructed on me, on 3 different PCs, about twice a year in that 4-year period. Not myth. Not from t'Internet. Direct personal experience. Btrfs `df` lies. You, and programs, can't get an accurate estimate of free space. OS snapshots fill the volume, volume corrupts, new install time. Over and…

Yah well. Do some housekeeping then? I mean if the Distro delivers automagically snapshotting in intervals, during installation of packages, or whatever they fancy? It's not like you'd need those for all eternity. By housekeeping I meant deleting them from time to time, with easily clickable tools, which exist(now/meanwhile), and DO give an overview. Maybe have to 'rebalance' afterwards, which can go wrong if the 'ho…

No. That is the simple answer. I refuse.

I will clean up my own mess. If I take snapshots, it's my job to clean them up.

If the OS does its own then the OS can do the work and clean up its own mess.

More to the point, if the OS's developers thought this was a good idea, then complete the work, finish the job, track the space usage and never ever do operations needing lots of space without checking that space is available or making it available.

This is bad design and bad implementation. It is not my job to fix their omissions.

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

#89

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

lproven wrote: post #88
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yah well. Do some housekeeping then? I mean if the Distro delivers automagically snapshotting in intervals, during installation of packages, or whatever they fancy? It's not like you'd need those for all eternity. By housekeeping I meant deleting them from time to time, with easily clickable tools, which exist(now/meanwhile), and DO give an overview. Maybe have to 'rebalance' afterwards, which can go wrong if the 'ho…

No. That is the simple answer. I refuse. I will clean up my own mess. If I take snapshots, it's my job to clean them up. If the OS does its own then the OS can do the work and clean up its own mess. More to the point, if the OS's developers thought this was a good idea, then complete the work, finish the job, track the space usage and never ever do operations needing lots of space without checking that space is avail…

Yah. Maybe (or even probably, given the history and all the (not even that anecdotical) evidence of all the gotchas and oopsies that happended so far) I'll eat chalk.

But so far I'm really enjoying my new hot technotoy, in combination with some other 'crazy' tools, like zram, profilesync-deamon for the browser, a really 'riced' kernal...err kernel with all sorts of powerful patches, and even most parts of the userland compiled with optimizations to the limits of my cpu, even the browser!

ISTR you mentioned the crappy default partioning suggestions from another OS in another thread, which seem inflexible because of the potential waste of space for different directories like /usr/var/serv/somecrap/whatnotelse/GO/HOME!, which really can't be known in advance for casual desktop-use, and I concure.

But with BTRFS-subvolumes that shit doesn't matter anymore! Whee! :)

I'll wait and see, and will abuse the really unexpectedly well working combination of components and their versions and settings to the max, not having experienced hitches, glitches, or even crashes so far.

But anything which could get lost is backed up incrementally to elsewhere anyways, just in case.

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

#90

Post by lproven »

hk1337 wrote: post #79
lproven wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, yeah but also at this time Linux had not even been around half a decade. My thought was more that maybe a lot of the issues people are having with Linux to push them to BSD is what we, developers collectively, have done to Linux over the last 2-3 decades.

> Well, yeah but also at this time Linux had not even been around half a decade.

Ah, yes, good point!

> My thought was more that maybe a lot of the issues people are having with Linux to push them to BSD is what we, developers collectively, have done to Linux over the last 2-3 decades.

Indeed so. Especially in the last decade or so: snap, Flatpak, Wayland, systemd, etc.

It's being made gratuitously more and more complex to meet the demands of the main commercial users -- running cloud servers -- even if this makes like much more complicated for individual users.

Which is why I advocate the BSDs as an alternative, but man, they are all forbidding and offputting to beginners/novices, and some of them don't even realise why and how.

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