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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

#101

Post by Gigachad »

someotherperson wrote: post #98

Oh wow. I did the same thing a couple of weeks ago. The server hadn't been updated since ~2015, running a blog on Ghost from that time with node 0.10 installed. I was a bit rougher though: I just took a backup, then let my Hermes agent (Gemini 3.1 Pro) loose on it. It upgraded everything that needed to be upgraded, patched what needed to be patched, then proceeded to migrate everything to it's most recent equivalents…

I mean you can update trivially without AI. The problem is the risk of breaking something, which the backup mitigates.

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

#102

Post by infinet »

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),…

I hope FreeBSD has longer supporting cycle. Its release has a supporting life of less than one year, if missing the upgrade window, then later upgrade is more difficult than others such as debian stable.

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

#103

Post by infinet »

mhitza wrote: post #20
gh02t wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rocky's docs are also really nice. They aren't as thorough as RedHat's, but they're much more readable and concise, and tend to be written for a less enterprise-y audience.

Don't even remind me about the RedHat docs, lol. Their solutions pages used to be readable with an account, now I think you need a subscription too. The manuals, indeed are good, though for more esoteric issues I land too often on a gated answer page.

Content wise the RedHat docs are great, but navigating the doc has a wired feeling that is hard to describe. Everything is black and white, the page has low information density perhaps because of the line space or paragraph space; the typesetting of command line and configure examples is not clear separated from surrounding text; mouse cannot select text of the command line examples; the page top is distracting because it keeps showing and disappearing as mouse scrolls up and down. Somehow the left navigation pane is also difficult to follow, easy to get lost when trying to find a section.

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

#104

Post by kuekacang »

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…

Only using ubuntu rn, but when the server is mostly running docker, it is simpler upgrade nowadays with so little dependencies. But then the problem just moved to the container image updates.

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

#105

Post by shric »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #50
shric wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The key here is “coworker”. He has an obligation to do reasonable things due to being employed by someone and it affecting others.

This is completely different. When it’s a person blog and a personal VPS it’s affecting nobody but that person.

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

#106

Post by not_kurt_godel »

shric wrote: post #105
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The key here is “coworker”. He has an obligation to do reasonable things due to being employed by someone and it affecting others. This is completely different. When it’s a person blog and a personal VPS it’s affecting nobody but that person.

And that's A-OK for them if that person likes more work with more headaches for a solution that costs more and performs worse. (Although less OK for everyone else when their VPS gets compromised and made part of a botnet or otherwise used for cybercrime.)

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

#108

Post by wolvoleo »

pm2222 wrote: post #13
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?

Use a rolling release like Arch and it’s supported forever.

But then you have constant maintenance. I prefer rolling distros, don't get me wrong. But it does mean you will get the latest of every package constantly and some cause problems.

For a box that sits in a corner doing its joband you don't want to pay attention to it's not a good choice IMO. On a desktop you want the latest of everything on and you have time to keep up it's the best.

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

#109

Post by jadedragon942 »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #87
vsgherzi wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yknow unfortunately I just don't think we're going to see eye to eye on this one. I really don't mind that small amount work and I enjoy owning and operating the entire stack. That dosen't really seem like your cup of tea. The flexibility and learning is more important for me. For example I want to aggregate HN comments and lobste.rs comments and inject that into the HTML before serving. (on the server side so no COR…

I mean, obviously we're not gonna see eye-to-eye if you're talking about a non-static, non-hugo site, which was the subject of my comment. I've owned and operated enough stacks e2e both personally and professionally to have gotten over the novelty. The less shit that can go wrong, the better. I sleep better at night not wondering whether any of the constant stream of IPs in my fail2ban log is wielding a yet-to-be-CVE…

Sorry to jump in... But why are you ssh'ing into your hosts over the open net? Why not tailscale? Why not wireguard?

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

#110

Post by eff-nix »

nextos wrote: post #53
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?

I would say NixOS, where it is trivial to switch across releases, run software from different releases, and perform rollbacks. I have been running NixOS on several servers for more than a decade. No reinstalling, upgrading, or any breaks whatsoever.

Earlier today, I tried to run a simple nix tool a colleague made. 3 hours into the build, it crashed. Something about a missing python import? I ran the exact same ‘nix develop’ again. 2 hours later, it worked.

Keep in mind: this was just a simple rest server. But for some reason it needed to (nondeterministically) build the word from scratch to send that single request.

I’ll take a docker system thank you.

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