DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD • Hacker News Board

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#101

Post by bitroliest » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

4ad wrote: post #89

Thaxll wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things here: - If you use Dtrace to troubleshoot a problem it's way beyond your scope of knowledge as a web developer. Dtrace is too deep and very specific to certain problems that you will never see because your regular nginx + php works fine in all cases. - Not everyone wants and should be good at everything. Just be good at what your doing well, I'm not saying that one shouldn't be curious but Dtrace isn't "an…

If you don't use DTrace to debug php, you're missing a lot: http://php.net/manual/en/features.dtrace.dtrace.php . Same for python and ruby and node.js. All these have DTrace support. DTrace is not hard, it's essential; and it's significantly easier, than say, awk, which is another crucial tool.

Under OSX it seems that DTrace support is incomplete thanks to OSX' dtrace implementation [1]. [1] https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/3617

I think only Solaris has full support?

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#102

Post by m-app » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #91

zachberger wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my naivety, but why do you need more than 16 addresses per droplet?

Here is a good explanation: http://etherealmind.com/allocating-64-wasteful-ipv6-not/ .

You still get a /64 at DO, though. So this doesn't hold true.

EDIT: Should add that you do not get a complete /64, but 16 addresses from a /64. Probably in a private VLAN or something.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#103

Post by _delirium » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 9:21 PM UTC

xenophonf wrote: post #67

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?

My reasons for using FreeBSD are a little more philosophical: - I want to have a stable base O/S to which I can always easily return. - I want to be able to customize installed packages in an easily scalable way. - I want a server O/S to be simple to maintain, relative to Windows or Solaris. - I want the goddamned documentation installed. During development it's difficult to get RHEL or Ubuntu back to a known-good se…

> On RHEL or Ubuntu, you typically have to install the developer tools, hunt down the source RPMs/DEBs...

Nitpick, but on Debian/Ubuntu this is a lot more simple than you make it sound:

    apt-get source xxx     # download the source package for 'xxx'
    apt-get build-dep xxx  # install everything needed to build it

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#104

Post by quasse » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 9:26 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #91

zachberger wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my naivety, but why do you need more than 16 addresses per droplet?

Here is a good explanation: http://etherealmind.com/allocating-64-wasteful-ipv6-not/ .

Whoever wrote this doesn't seem to quite understand how bit math works.

"IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long, compared to 32 bits long for IPv4. In other words, IPv6 addresses are 296 times more numerous than IPv4 addresses."

IPv6 addresses are actually 2^128/2^32 or 7.9e+28 times more numerous than IPv4, which would strengthen the argument that it's hard to be "wasteful" with them in the way described.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#105

Post by czk » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 9:31 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #96

sullrich wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also seeing really poor write speeds when comparing to my Linux droplets. 11MB/sec vs. 216MB/sec on Linux

Are these the same datacenter? The same rack? I suspect that degraded instances and overly-busy disks are not endemic to AWS.

Mine are both in NYC3, so same datacenter. No clue regarding rack/host. I can't comment on AWS...

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#106

Post by wglb » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 9:33 PM UTC

brynet wrote: post #95

wglb wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the package system used by OpenBSD is explicitly borrowed from FreeBSD.

That's not true. OpenBSD's package system was rewritten by Marc Espie many years ago in perl, the utility names are inherited from FreeBSD, but are now otherwise unrelated.

Ah, I misquoted. On the page http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html, they point out that the ports tree concept was borrowed from FreeBSD.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#107

Post by woodman » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 9:37 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #87

woodman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from CentOS to FreeBSD as my daily driver a little over a year ago, for the ports tree. I needed a bleeding edge version of valgrind, but my ~/bin and ~/lib were already pretty unwieldy - so that is what caused the switch. That and ZFS. But I've found a couple of other things that I really like: the documentation is awesome, and config files are where you'd expect them to be. Being able to tune system inte…

Linux has sysctl as well, and other parameters can be set by writing to the right files in /sys. For example, the maximum c-state can be set by writing to /sys/module/processor/parameters/max_cstate (if you have support enabled in the kernel).

The linux sysctl is a wrapper for kernel state represented in the file system, freebsd sysctl is direct to kernel. So that is nice, everything in one place. Before my switch to freebsd, I had been a linux user since 2000 - and while I was aware of the existence of sysctl, I don't remember seeing it used very often. It was much more common to see direct interaction with stuff in /proc (rockectraid, never again). Why is that? Is it an issue with standardizing driver interaction or what?

My prior post wasn't written as a statement of exclusivity, simply that I prefer the way freebsd does it.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#108

Post by grahamedgecombe » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 9:56 PM UTC

quasse wrote: post #104

IgorPartola wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a good explanation: http://etherealmind.com/allocating-64-wasteful-ipv6-not/ .

Whoever wrote this doesn't seem to quite understand how bit math works. "IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long, compared to 32 bits long for IPv4. In other words, IPv6 addresses are 296 times more numerous than IPv4 addresses." IPv6 addresses are actually 2^128/2^32 or 7.9e+28 times more numerous than IPv4, which would strengthen the argument that it's hard to be "wasteful" with them in the way described.

I get the impression that 296 is meant to be 2^96, which is exactly the same as your figure.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#109

Post by weavie » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 9:56 PM UTC

I am very intrigued by BSD as it comes highly recommended here. I just need an excuse to dip my toes.

I need to set up a nginx -> nodejs server for a project soon. Given I have set up a number of linux servers without trouble, how much of a struggle would it be to just use BSD for this new project? Would it be worth holding off and just messing about in a VM, or would my linux experience just transfer directly to setting up on FreeBSD?

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#110

Post by keidian » Wed, Jan 14, 2015, 9:58 PM UTC

ghc wrote: post #48

Finally, finally, finally! I've been waiting for either DO or Linode to offer this since forever. Now the only thing left on my wishlist is OpenBSD support.

Linode doesn't (last i checked anyway) officially support FreeBSD but people were doing it years ago in the irc channel when I used to hang out there