11–20 of 251 posts
Curious what “home servers” are really for. I’ve gone decades without needing a home server — what am I missing out on?
I also use it from my other computers via ssh to access git, irc, keepass, and whatever else tickles my fancy.
If "kubesomething" is the reason, there's no requirement to use it. I think most people don't run it on their home servers.
If containers are the reason, then again, they are not a requirement. But they are pretty similar to BSD's jails. I don't think they are particularly complex.
FreeBSD has a number of strong suits: ZFS, a different kernel and network stack, a cohesive system from a small(ish) team of authors, the handbook, etc. But the usual Linux hobgoblins listed above are a red herring here, to my mind.
In my experience, systemd is far better and more reliable than anything else, especially if you need complex logic (ex: when this and that happen, start doing this, except when such and such are present)
Most of the problems I've seen come from trying to duplicate systemd functions: in the author example, why bother with rsyslog or network-manager?
I have also seen many people refusing to learn modern tools, instead trying to make it work with the tools they know, by disabling what works better, often with poor results.
It's like trying to keep using ifconfig and route instead of ip: you can make it work, but for say managing multiple ip on the same interface forces you to go with eth0:0 eth0:1 etc (and let's not even talk about network namespaces).
I like the various BSD and distributions like postmarket OS, but I wish they had access to modern tools instead of having to "roll my own" with scripts or make do with what they depend on
Just another “I don’t like systemd and refuse to understand it” rant. I can’t think of any change that has improved my Linux sysadmin experience more than the move to systemd. Is it complicated? Perhaps it is. But this FUD about it being resource intensive or unreliable or difficult to use is complete nonsense. And on top of that systemd isn’t even “Linux.” Plenty of popular production-ready distros like Alpine Linux…
Just another “I don’t like systemd and refuse to understand it” rant. I can’t think of any change that has improved my Linux sysadmin experience more than the move to systemd. Is it complicated? Perhaps it is. But this FUD about it being resource intensive or unreliable or difficult to use is complete nonsense. And on top of that systemd isn’t even “Linux.” Plenty of popular production-ready distros like Alpine Linux…
I notice FreeBSD admins tend to follow a 'pets not cattle' approach, carefully nurturing individual systems. Linux admins like myself typically prefer the 'cattle not pets' mindset—using infrastructure-as-code where if a server dies, no problem, just spin up another one. Leverage containers. Statelessness. I don't want to spend time meticulously configuring things beyond the core infrastructure my services run on. I…
The only thing I currently run on FreeBSD is my storage box. ZFS is absolutely amazing, and FreeBSD supports it fully and without any of the "jank" you'd get running ZFS on Linux. It Just Works (tm), bottom to top. Anything else, I want what I'm familiar with on Linux, like containers and systemd services. I know some people really love pf, but I've been using iptables for so long it would be annoying to switch at th…
This is why I use FreeBSD as well for my home server, first class ZFS support out of the box. Void Linux musl on my desktop.
I had an old 2TB ZFS array that was part of a trunas setup kicking around for years. I needed to recover some files from it so I hooked all the disks to a motherboard and booted FreeBSD live. I didn't have to do anything, the array was already up and running when I logged in. ezpz.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
systemd is indeed awesome. i'd rather kms than go back to maintaining init.d scripts.
> systemd is indeed awesome. i'd rather kms than go back to maintaining init.d scripts. systemd-as-init-replacement was probably fine. systemd-as-kitchen-sink can get annoying.
The only truly bad systemd-* I've worked with is systemd-journald. Which often fails to contain log entries that should be present or simply just corrupts itself.
Curious what “home servers” are really for. I’ve gone decades without needing a home server — what am I missing out on?
An always-on machine to handle recurring tasks (remote backups, say).
Maybe a VPN gateway (you can also just use an AppleTV for that, though, with Tailscale)
Home automation if HomeKit isn't your thing, for whatever reason.
Network-wide adblocking, custom DNS, et c.
You really, really don't need one. But they can be nice.
Also some people just like tinkering. Can't relate (any more) but I've got my thing down to requiring single-digit hours per year.
[EDIT] Of course, part of how I avoid making it more work is that I don't upgrade the core OS, since it has minimal exposure to public networks and everything I care about comes from Docker so IDGAF how old the package collection is. Especially with ZFS in play, upgrades are... fraught. At some point whatever old-ass Debian I have on there will be too old and I'll have to, IDK, image the whole base OS disk as a backup and spend probably a whole weekend screwing with it when it inevitably breaks itself on upgrade. I may just migrate to FreeBSD instead, when the time comes.
Curious what “home servers” are really for. I’ve gone decades without needing a home server — what am I missing out on?
For all those things you really shouldn't trust "the cloud"
Just another “I don’t like systemd and refuse to understand it” rant. I can’t think of any change that has improved my Linux sysadmin experience more than the move to systemd. Is it complicated? Perhaps it is. But this FUD about it being resource intensive or unreliable or difficult to use is complete nonsense. And on top of that systemd isn’t even “Linux.” Plenty of popular production-ready distros like Alpine Linux…
I'm only still on Linux for my server because Docker saves me from having to interact with systemd at all. Or, indeed, from caring very much what distro I'm even on.