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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

#111

Post by com2kid »

WJW wrote: post #63
andix wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years is not a lot. It releases every 2 years, so it requires upgrading at least every 4 years. In the worst case it's just 3 years of support, if you install right before the next release. ELTS is 10 years and paid. It's great that it exists, but not relevant for my toy projects.

So there is a project that you care enough about to keep it alive, but 1-2 hours every FOUR YEARS is too much? At some point I just have to call you lazy dude. Either the 1-2 hours is a drop in the bucket compared to what you spend on it anyway (like a blog you still regularly update), or you don't actively update the project but still care enough about it to spend half an evening every few years, or you should just…

> So there is a project that you care enough about to keep it alive, but 1-2 hours every FOUR YEARS is too much? At some point I just have to call you lazy dude.

I want the machine that serves my static blog pages to have, ideally, 0 maintenance.

It needs to do one thing, serve some static HTTP pages and have new pages pushed to it.

Quite frankly I wish some of those "minimal docker first OSs" had taken off.

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

#112

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

nijave wrote: post #95
kylec wrote: post #27

I, too, have a server running 16.04 that I'm afraid to update. It currently has an uptime of 1281 days... at this point I'd feel bad rebooting it

dd filesystem to another machine then boot it up with an emulator like qemu and do a trial run Be careful if you have anything that autostarts that reaches out

Genius.

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

#113

Post by not_kurt_godel »

jadedragon942 wrote: post #109
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Great question...the answer is I don't, because I don't have any web hosting servers, or even persistent app servers for that matter. I've built 99% serverless for 10 years now and it has been glorious. Will never go back to managing individual hosts ever again if I can help it.

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

#114

Post by computerfriend »

wolvoleo wrote: post #108
pm2222 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have an Arch server that has been online for ten years (yikes), never had any issues with it.

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

#115

Post by MBCook »

Thaxll wrote: post #8

The benchmarks are completely off, and a recent version of Ubuntu with sane config would easily beat Freebsd.

Don’t forget there are serious hardware differences. It’s not apples to apples.

But that’s ok. The author isn’t claiming FreeBSD is way better than Linux. It’s just a comparison of what he had vs what he has now.

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

#116

Post by TylerE »

computerfriend wrote: post #114
wolvoleo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have an Arch server that has been online for ten years (yikes), never had any issues with it.

> never had any issues with it.

You've never NOTICED any issues. Which is far from the same claim...

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

#117

Post by grebc »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #59
sgc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OMG, not the once in a lifetime viral opportunity! You will never win this crusade, because there are too many people here who know from experience a VPS is neither expensive, nor under-performing up to millions of users a day, nor hard.

That's fine, it's not really a crusade. Just my opinion about the right infrastructure for the right use case informed by the objective reasons I gave. If doing more work with more headaches for a solution that costs more and performs worse is your jam, then power to you.

You’ve written nothing objective.

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

#118

Post by d3Xt3r »

andix wrote: post #22
mhitza wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But are they maintained well? Alma has a few affordances as it's no longer RHEL source compatible, which means it could ship priviledge escalation fixes with new kernel updates faster. Rocky responded with an extra, optional to enable, security repo to provide mitigations to the exploits while waiting for RHEL to downstream. Look pretty well maintained to me. If only judging by recent events.

Thanks! I don't care much about being fully RHEL compatible, or no ABI changes at all. I just want a system that gets security fixes quickly with as little chances of breaking things as possible.

How about a lightweight immutable distro, like say Fedora CoreOS or openSUSE MicroOS?

Fedora CoreOS in particular has had a good track record delivering patches quickly. Like for CopyFail was pushed to the stable channel in about a day, IIRC, but the patch was already available within a few hours of disclosure in the "next" / testing channel.

Talos and Flatcar are also worth considering if you want an even smaller attack surface, from what I heard they weren't even affected by CopyFail.

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

#119

Post by niel »

arjie wrote: post #62

The biggest mistake I made was high uptime. arjie.com was up for 10 years plus on a Hetzner VPS so that by the time they wanted to sunset the machine underlying I had no idea what my teenage self had set up. I have the backups but the site hasn’t been up in a decade… Nowadays I build things so that they move and I have moved things about a bit so I know they work.

This reminds me of Ise Shrine in Japan, which is completely dismantled then rebuilt every 20 years.

This is top of mind because I recently read Breakneck by Dan Wang. He makes the case that this practice of rebuilding the shrine preserves knowledge that would otherwise have been lost to time. Wang contrasts Ise Shrine with Notre Dame, where rebuilding the roof is apparently quite difficult, perhaps in part due to the loss of knowledge. I'm not familiar enough with either structure to judge whether this is a fair comparison, but I like the principle.

(Edit to add: This is only a minor analogy from the book, which I highly recommend overall.)

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

#120

Post by culi »

arjie wrote: post #62

The biggest mistake I made was high uptime. arjie.com was up for 10 years plus on a Hetzner VPS so that by the time they wanted to sunset the machine underlying I had no idea what my teenage self had set up. I have the backups but the site hasn’t been up in a decade… Nowadays I build things so that they move and I have moved things about a bit so I know they work.

Sometimes I leave Architectural Decision Records for personal projects. It feels silly but it honestly comes in handy more times than expected
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