161–170 of 221 posts
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https://vultr.com/ is what I use. No complains.
You do have to fax them a copy of your driver's license and credit card in order for them to open up outbound SMTP, though.
What's kept me on FreeBSD is the Ports tree (the third-party package build infrastructure). I love how easily I can build customized packages for my computers, especially now with pkgng and tools like poudriere (refer to this great tutorial at http://www.bsdnow.tv/tutorials/poudriere). I can very easily set up my own custom package repository that either supplements or wholly replaces FreeBSD's. I've tried to do similar things with Linux, but it definitely isn't as easy. The ports tree committers are very responsive, and creating (and submitting!) one's own packages is both well documented and very easy.
I like how much of the system configuration is done in /etc/rc.conf. I like how the various system and ports tree build-time knobs are all in /etc/make.conf. I like how daily maintenance scripts/health checks both run by default and are all configured in /etc/periodic.conf. I like how understandable the base system is, kernel internals included. I'm no expert developer (and believe me, there's plenty of advanced Unix hacker wizardry in the FreeBSD sources), but things are accessible enough to even one such as me that I successfully modified the ciss driver this year to work around a weird bug in some old server gear I was experimenting with.
Don't get me wrong - I love me some Unix, but modern Linux distributions seem over-complicated in a lot of the ways I don't like about Solaris or AIX or Windows, even though there's a lot of nice stuff from the perspective of an end user. If you install Ubuntu or Fedora, a lot of stuff Just Works(tm), and that's great! I love Ubuntu and Fedora! But if anything breaks and I have to go digging, things get complicated so rapidly that it makes debugging more of an effort than it should be.
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FYI, this issue exists in PC-BSD too. I tend to use Chromium anyway and Firefox as a backup, so it doesn't bite me as much when I'm in that OS. But it's definitely a big one.
Well, you can work around it (with no known downsides) by adding: export MOZ_DISABLE_IMAGE_OPTIMIZE=1 To the top of your ~/.xinitrc file. Kind of surprised PC-BSD doesn't do that for you. Probably should ask them to.
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This is OT, but since you seem to know a fair bit about filesystem types and their trades and have an opinion on sane patching behavior, I have a question you might be able to answer: Why aren't modern filesystems based on a content-addressable-store where the content is 100% separated from the organization of the filesystem itself? It seems to me like it would make more sense to have only one copy of a file ever sav…
Zfs, to take one example, does do approximately what you want - the file system (or rather, the underlying block storage) has a tree structure, and changes to files are propagated via copy-on-write rewrites up the tree, so that earlier snapshots still get to see the original file. This does make rolling things back trivial. It doesn't give you dedupe for free, though. Think about what would have to happen: every modi…
But I don't think you'd have this problem. Just like we have an inode telling every block of a file, a filesystem like that would need a similar structure telling every hash of the file. When you delete a block, you look at this structure, the same way you look at an inode.
The only thing missing is that you'll need a counter at the blocks. And this counter will create some synchronization problems that may turn out more important than saving disk space.
BSD is often just a little bit different. Hard to be unbiased. Some people prefer GNU make, some like bsdmake. - kqueue is a very powerful event loop similar to epoll [1] - the FreeBSD ports collection is very simple to use as far as compiling from source goes. I only really prefer Debian's apt-get and Gentoo's emerge - the FreeBSD Handbook is a very well-maintained text [2]. I freely admit OpenBSD has the best man p…
One way where the problem with this is showing, is the filesystem notification API of kqueue. It is a ridiculously bad API. E.g., you can't properly watch a directory with it. Replacing it with something saner would require changes to kqueue. If it had been designed like epoll then it would only require adding a different API to create a filesystem notification file descriptor.
Their staff are technically savvy, and I don't know of anyone else who has tested the options in this way, in production. They have a popular mobile app which turns your phone into a walkie talkie and more, and have millions of users.
I saw them interviewed about their move to FreeBSD recently: http://youtu.be/NGT3jpilYfE?t=15m
I like FreeBSD, but I have yet to run the same stack on multiple operating systems in production. That's a LOT of work!
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Full end to end checksumming. ZFS can find and correct errors on the fly, and can ensure data integrity. Even on a single disk ZFS can notify the user what files have been damaged and should be restored from backup. That is the most important thing for me, I want to make sure that my data is safe.
This is only guaranteed with ECC RAM, right?
There is no file system that can protect against corruption if a bit is flipped in memory while reading from/writing to disk, at least with ZFS it can warn me and re-read the data from disk and give the upper layers a valid file.
Even without ECC RAM ZFS's end-to-end checksumming can help save your data and give you piece of mind that it is not silently being corrupted once it's on disk.
Like others have said, being unbiased is difficult, but I'll try. First, Linux v FreeBSD is really tough, so I will instead approach this from Debian v FreeBSD. I really like how easy Debian on the desktop is: install it, apt-get install xfce, and I have a nice desktop. It's very easy to add Adobe Flash, Steam, Skype, etc. The FreeBSD desktop isn't as nice. You can add things like Flash and Skype on FreeBSD, but you…
I may be confused since I'm only now moving some servers to FreeBSD, but it sounds like you're suggesting freebsd-update brings in bleeding age, incompatible version if you want to get security fixes. Is that actually the case? I've got zero interest in running it as a desktop so I'm guessing that'll hit me less, but it's worrisome to hear. As a side note, I'd love to have something like "freebsd-update rollback" for…
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/howto-freebsd-zfs-madness...
How does the storage stack compare? I really love ZFS and have used ZoL quite extensively in the past for a VPS/baremetal backup system and of course FreeBSD has rock solid ZFS support. But Linux has bomber RAID, LVM, dm(which lets you write you're own targets and do all kinds of awesome mapping) etc.
And then of course there are "containers". I'm aware of jails and they are much tested but I saw the other day that they don't have cgroup type features to allow controlling RAM and CPU usage? Namespaces? Is it the case that Linux containers are overtaking jails on the features front?
I really like the idea of FreeBSD and I have bought "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System"(which I ought to start reading) but I'll admit to not knowing a whole lot about it. Most of the topics that come up in comparison discussions seem a bit more superficial than what I'm interested in.
I started using FreeBSD (version 4.8 at the time) in 2003 and I began a switch to Ubuntu in around 2011. Disclaimer: the following is all very opinionated and 8.1 is the last version of FreeBSD I actively used. Actually, it's still running without any problems on a colocated machine, but it's a bit a "don't touch it" situation, because upgrading even a single piece of software would probably cause a cataclysm of stru…
You mean like Netflix And Whatsap do?