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DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

digitalocean.com

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Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#31

Post by joshbaptiste »

xhrpost wrote: post #28

As a web developer who knows enough Linux to do minimum dev-ops, could anyone recommend some things worth playing around with in FreeBSD? Like "do this and see how easy it is vs Ubuntu!". Or are the gains more long term like better stability?

Dtrace alone will turn you from a developer to a Developer + Systems admin + practical OS engineer, you will understand how your stack is performing within various lower levels of the operating system and be able to tune the hell out of your stack from bottom up.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#32

Post by hiphopyo »

Should have gone with OpenBSD instead to be honest. Half the requests on your UserVoice are for OpenBSD. All the coolest stuff in FreeBSD comes from OpenBSD.

OpenBSD -- the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS. Creator of the world's most used SSH implementation OpenSSH, the world's most elegant firewall PF, the world's most elegant mail server OpenSMTPD, the OpenSSL rewrite LibreSSL, and the NTP rewrite OpenNTPD. OpenBSD -- the cleanest kernel, the cleanest userland, the cleanest configuration syntax and some of the world's best documentation.

FreeBSD, on the other hand, is becoming more of a testbed for experimental, some would even say unnecessary technologies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8546756. It's also having a hard time catching up to OpenBSD: http://itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/62641-crypto-....

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#33

Post by ketralnis »

I've been using Vultr.com for this for a while and they're pretty nice. Slightly cheaper, promises that they don't oversell their servers, and they've had FreeBSD for long enough to have got the kinks out.

They also let you just upload an ISO and install any OS you like from there, which is handy for non-default FreeBSD configurations like ZFS-on-root

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#35

Post by bch »

hiphopyo wrote: post #32

Should have gone with OpenBSD instead to be honest. Half the requests on your UserVoice are for OpenBSD. All the coolest stuff in FreeBSD comes from OpenBSD. OpenBSD -- the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS. Creator of the world's most used SSH implementation OpenSSH, the world's most elegant firewall PF, the world's most elegant mail server OpenSMTPD, the OpenSSL rewrite LibreSSL, and the NTP rewrite Ope…

I was going to downvote your comment, but instead:

> All the coolest stuff in FreeBSD comes from OpenBSD

This is juvenile "I'd rather push a Ford than drive a Dodge" level commentary. It's not true, and isn't even interesting.

That any BSD is getting support is a good thing -- it opens the door to others following, and is good news.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#36

Post by xenophonf »

zzzcpan wrote: post #14

Just created a droplet and sadly, it is 10.1 amd64 only. Won't be very useful on low-memory VMs. I hope they add i386 too. EDIT: Anyone cares to explain downvotes?

What's your idea of a low-memory virtual machine? For test purposes I'm running FreeBSD/amd64 under Hyper-V in 128-MB RAM without any problems, although it is using around 32-MB of encrypted swap. That includes the Salt minion, Postfix, and an untuned static Apache 2.4 installation. Of course, it's much more comfortable in 256-MB RAM with around 44-MB RAM free according to top, and of course that's workload-dependent (e.g., my mail relay running amavisd-new and ClamAV wants 1.5-GB RAM after loading all of the spam and virus signatures). I could definitely see wanting to run FreeBSD in 128-MB or less RAM, but I'm very curious about your specific workloads. (It's the gearhead equivalent of wanting to look under the other guy's hood. If you're doing something cool, I want to hear about it!)

P.S. Hyper-V will let me go as low as 32-MB RAM, so thanks to you I'm keen to try out different operating system installs (and workloads) in low-memory environments.

P.P.S. Upvoted parent - I think the parent comment contributes to the discussion, even though I would personally love to see commenter go into more detail.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#37

Post by kchoudhu »

hueving wrote: post #21
pyvpx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what will you do with a pfSense VM on DO?

You could connect all of your VMs to it via ipsec or openvpn and have your own little private network.

Unfortunately, you can't. IPSEC isn't enabled by default in the FreeBSD kernel.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#39

Post by neumino »

wcchandler wrote: post #19
neumino wrote: post #17

Nice, but I wish they didn't deprecate Archlinux though :/

Couldn't you do a bootstrapped install if you really wanted it? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_from_existing_L...

Well, it's more of a pain to setup right. It doesn't take 10 seconds anymore.

Then like all cloud services, things get bad when you can't properly boot or start the network services. I used to run Arch with a more recent kernel and that kind of happened after an upgrade.

To be fair, I can understand why they don't want to support Arch as it's probably a bit of work, but they are also a cheap service, so some people (like me) like to have a little server running there just for personal stuff (IRC bouncer, ssh tunnel etc.). And in this case, you want something closer to your own system.

They still provide a good service in my opinion as I still use them :)

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#40

Post by Thaxll »

joshbaptiste wrote: post #31
xhrpost wrote: post #28

As a web developer who knows enough Linux to do minimum dev-ops, could anyone recommend some things worth playing around with in FreeBSD? Like "do this and see how easy it is vs Ubuntu!". Or are the gains more long term like better stability?

Dtrace alone will turn you from a developer to a Developer + Systems admin + practical OS engineer, you will understand how your stack is performing within various lower levels of the operating system and be able to tune the hell out of your stack from bottom up.

Come on, 0.1% of the people need Dtrace...
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