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Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

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Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#41

Post by tracker1 »

Personally, I've been running with Caddy in front of Docker (compose) for most of my personal/hobby usage. If it's a straight website, I'll let Caddy serve the contents directly... for "web apps" I'll pretty much containerize all the things and use caddy for TLS termination and reverse-proxy duties to the app running under Docker...

Mostly ~/apps/appname, where each appname has a docker compose file, and the data directories mounted under appname... I can compose down and (s)ftp the data out for hard archives or to move a site/service. I had been running a few VMs under a dedicated server, but switched to separate VPSes on OVH. Only gotcha with OVH is if you want to run mail, you want to avoid the local zone VMs that don't allow mail hosting.

YMMV

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#42

Post by vsgherzi »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #30
jvanderbot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s3 + cloudfront takes approximately 2 extra steps every deploy, and about 10 extra steps that are easy to screw up at setup time. It's not a trivial drop-in, but yes, once it's done it's _really_ done.

You can make it zero deploy steps beyond git push with CodePipeline, and vibecoding makes the annoying config setup trivial if you know like 20% of what you're doing. There is really zero reason to be using a VPS for this unless you hate money, want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets.

This is a blog.... you don't need some monster machine. You can server TONS of people off the smallest Digital Ocean instance.

Many of these small VPSs can be had for less than a couple bucks a month. Tons of popular influencers run their own machines for their blog.

insinuating that it's unsafe to run your own machine is insanity. I don't understand this mindset of being scared to run your own stuff. Especially if you're doing doing it at such a large scale there's nothing wrong with doing it with nginx and a linux box on a vps. You'll learn a hell of a lot more and be fine. At the end of the day it's a computer. We've been hosting websites since the 70's. With the advant of cloud compute is easier than every to run your own.

(edited to be less mean)

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#43

Post by otherme123 »

nightfly wrote: post #12
KennyBlanken wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably Debian or Ubuntu. The question is...why do you care that much? I've upgraded Debian stable (both pure and with some cherry-picked backports) and Ubuntu (non-LTS and LTS) systems in place and rarely broken anything, for years and years. When stuff has broken it's been a quick google and then slapping myself for not having read the upgrade guide. I do generally wait about 2-3 weeks before upgrading, giving tim…

> The question is...why do you care that much? Not the OP, but I support Ubuntu as desktop and server OS for an engineering collage and have for 10ish years. Some LTS upgrades don't require many changes (mostly minor package name changes) and some take months of work to get rolled out (mostly for workstations, the server upgrades are usually quick.). Not everything gets upgraded every new OS release. If we had to upg…

I have a machine that has been Fedora since twenty-something to current 44, and upgrading yearly is a breeze. Three commands, and just wait for a download and the reboot. The only thing that breaks if you forget that the upgrade needs attention is the system Postgres, until I migrated to Podman images.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#45

Post by sgc »

coreyp_1 wrote: post #11

I'm in the same boat. I have 2 old servers that I let get "too" old, and now I'm afraid to touch them to update them. However, with some of the shenanigans that the Linux distributions are pulling around age verification/attestation, I'm considering bailing on them entirely. Note, I did try Artix, but when it broke last week after a restart (in which evidently something had gone wrong with an earlier kernel update),…

FWIW, I once abandoned an Ubuntu server for a decade, and managed to update it painlessly in 20 minutes. That same server is still running today, now with the latest LTS. I think I might have even started with Ubuntu 4, or perhaps 6, and it has been painless all the way through. Perhaps my slow upgrades saved me from early adopter woes :).

I use Debian now much more. With all the supply chain attacks, Debian Stable feels like an absolute jewel, even if there are always a few packages I need to handle separately because I want or need a more updated version. But I love the old school no-nonsense engineering ethos.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#46

Post by toast0 »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #25

Boggles my mind that people pay money to host hugo static sites on a VPS, which is objectively inferior and harder in every meaningful way compared to hosting for free on GitHub pages or S3+CloudFront.

I pay $35/month for a dedicated server for my nothing webpages. One the one hand, I could really host at home for $0/month extra. Or on a VPS for $5/month. I do need my own thing because I run a network testing tool that needs some amount of direct access.

On the other hand, dedicated servers are more fun, even if the cpus I get for $35/month are ancient. Is it $30/month fun? Probably not, but it's near zero given my situation.

At least I'm sensible and don't have an actual colo space to visit.

In the unlikely event I go viral, I'm pretty sure my server can manage serving https at 1gbps, and that's plenty. Maybe TLS is too much though, the cpus are too old for AESNI.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#47

Post by waynesonfire »

I was running Ubuntu 16.04; migrated to FreeBSD and I'm all in. Between 16.04 and the current version of Linux; the ecosystem shifted. It's values shifted in ways that did not align with me. This mis-alignment is what motivated me to boot-up FreeBSD. I'm glad I discovered it. I found my happy place again.

It's an incredible journey to take--whether you stick with it or not. Migrating to FreeBSD gives you new eyes into what Linux was, is, and the awesomeness of FreeBSD that is so hard to articulate; like describing the color blue. It must be taken as a whole to appreciate it; and I'm not just saying the OS, it's commands, kernel features, but, the end-to-end compute experience, over time.

If I could draw an equivelent, it would be like when Djistrka savagely destroyed the GOTO statement with a single, short, paper. It took a brilliant mind to articulate that and there has yet to be such a mind to describe the beauty of FreeBSD. So, the best I can do, is just to challenge you to try it.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#48

Post by andix »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #35
andix wrote: post #4

Slightly off topic: What's currently the free Linux distribution with the longest support cycle? For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because it got security updates for a really long time. With minimal risk of breaking things on updates. PS: after a bit of research Alma/Rocky Linux are probably the best choices for now. 10 years of support. But are they maintained well?

Debian LTS/extended LTS

5 years is not a lot. It releases every 2 years, so it requires upgrading at least every 4 years. In the worst case it's just 3 years of support, if you install right before the next release.

ELTS is 10 years and paid. It's great that it exists, but not relevant for my toy projects.

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#49

Post by skydhash »

adamddev1 wrote: post #29

I enjoyed my foray into trying FreeBSD for my personal server. There's something cool, clean, simple and "punk rock" about it. But I gave up as my main pain points were: - PM2 was buggy on FreeBSD, which I used to manage my processes - An alternative, using `rc.d` to run daemons was just so hard to get logs working. - The firewall required too much self configuration to get it right with all the best security practic…

> - PM2 was buggy on FreeBSD, which I used to manage my processes

For supervision?

> - An alternative, using `rc.d` to run daemons was just so hard to get logs working.

The unix way is to use logger(1) If you only want some simple message, or redirect to files using newsyslog(8) for managing the sizes of the files.

> The firewall required too much self configuration to get it right with all the best security practices (ie. What does one do with ICMP.) I was missing something like a template with the defaults that come with UFW, for instance.

I would recommend The Book of PF[0]. While FreeBSD has syntax difference with OpenBSD's pf, this should give you enough insight on how a firewall operates to get a sense of what rules to write.

[0]: https://nostarch.com/book-of-pf-4e

Re: Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

#50

Post by not_kurt_godel »

shric wrote: post #40
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can put the whole thing on CloudFlare Pages for free too. Zero reason to pay for or deal with the complexity of an unnecessary VPS.

Again “zero reason”. For some people it’s fun to have a VPS, that is a reason in and of itself.

Of course literally anything can be 'reasonable' if you a priori like doing it independent of its technical/functional merits. My ex-coworker liked to write literally tens of thousands of lines of extra, completely unnecessary code for fun. That was a fine reason for him personally but didn't make it any less stupid to deal with for the rest of us.
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