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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

#201

Post by htx80nerd »

peanut-walrus wrote: post #151
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 see no reason not to go with a rolling release distro for personal servers. Run all the services in containers and have the base OS auto-update itself as often as it needs. Went with openSUSE MicroOS myself, it updates and reboots almost daily so I can be pretty confident my server is healthy and it's atomic so if something does break and I don't feel like dealing with it, I can just click rollback button from cock…

>!!!I see no reason not to go with a rolling release distro!!! for personal servers. Run all the services in containers and !!!have the base OS auto-update itself as often as it needs.!!!

you do not belong in IT

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

#202

Post by unethical_ban »

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.

I stood up a dokuwiki instance recently and then documented how to stand up dokuwiki, haha.

I disabled revision history viewing and have a public portion and a private portion. I use it to track things I'm learning and document rollout procedures and commands I need for things. So far I have rclone backups into S3 Glacier, Tuwunel(Matrix) server deployment with voice/video support, and various little tutorials on server stuff I'm learning.

TLDR use a wiki!

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

#203

Post by andix »

peanut-walrus wrote: post #200
mx7zysuj4xew wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you listed is the antithesis to managing and maintaining high availability systems

It's your personal toy server, you are optimizing for something entirely different than high availability.

I have around 20 "personal toy servers". I really don't like to fix them all the time.

Most of them are some small VMs or some Rasperry Pis controlling something. I want minimal changes on those systems, but still being able to update them.

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

#204

Post by andix »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #118
andix wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 at…

Been there, done that. Less changes are just better.

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

#205

Post by unethical_ban »

htx80nerd wrote: post #201
peanut-walrus wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no reason not to go with a rolling release distro for personal servers. Run all the services in containers and have the base OS auto-update itself as often as it needs. Went with openSUSE MicroOS myself, it updates and reboots almost daily so I can be pretty confident my server is healthy and it's atomic so if something does break and I don't feel like dealing with it, I can just click rollback button from cock…

>!!!I see no reason not to go with a rolling release distro!!! for personal servers. Run all the services in containers and !!!have the base OS auto-update itself as often as it needs.!!! you do not belong in IT

Personal servers.

There are things that need 9^5 and there are things that don't. If someone backs up their application configs and data properly, then the only thing that really matters is a proper backup strategy.

All my critical files are backed up periodically (manually) via rclone to S3 glacier, and all my services are documented in dokuwiki. If you use ansible or want to store configs and installation scripts, a private git repo would do well.

After that, I don't see a problem running rolling or short-support OS like Fedora Server for application hosting.

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

#206

Post by gosub100 »

miguno wrote: post #189
gosub100 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main pain points were that it doesn't survive power hits. If your power goes out, it will reboot and ask you to manually fsck the filesystem.

You didn’t use ZFS with FreeBSD?

Now I do, but I built a few headless media servers for friends and was very disappointed when they stopped working after power outages.

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

#207

Post by unethical_ban »

andix wrote: post #48
tannhaeuser wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian LTS/extended LTS

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.

I don't work on a server team, but in network/network security. My company made an announcement that they are extending our product's software lifetime to four years: 3 years standard support + 1 year high sev patches.

It seems to me in the 2020s that 5-7 years is plenty of support for a single OS release, and that OS support teams should be nimble enough to roll out new instances and migrate data at that cadence.

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

#208

Post by andix »

unethical_ban wrote: post #205
htx80nerd wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>!!!I see no reason not to go with a rolling release distro!!! for personal servers. Run all the services in containers and !!!have the base OS auto-update itself as often as it needs.!!! you do not belong in IT

Personal servers. There are things that need 9^5 and there are things that don't. If someone backs up their application configs and data properly, then the only thing that really matters is a proper backup strategy. All my critical files are backed up periodically (manually) via rclone to S3 glacier, and all my services are documented in dokuwiki. If you use ansible or want to store configs and installation scripts,…

Great. I like my personal servers to just keep working. Without having to restore backups. And without having to spend one Saturday every month to update and fix all the servers.

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

#209

Post by andix »

tombert wrote: post #94
nextos wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've only been running NixOS (in any serious capacity) for three years, but I have installed it on every computer that I am allowed to install it on now. It has been the most headache-free Linux I've used, simply because I'm less scared to play with and fix stuff. The fact that rollbacks are trivial and snapshots are automatic, and since everything is declarative in a text file anyway, I am way braver. If I do someth…

> simply because I'm less scared to play with and fix stuff.

The main reason of a LTS distribution is not having to play around and fix stuff. Install something once, and it keeps running without any changes, but still gets security updates.

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

#210

Post by andix »

interroboink wrote: post #70
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.

I feel there is a balance to be struck between a project that is popular (where if you run into problems, you will get good support), and one that technically gives longer-term support (but if things go wrong, that support might not be very good). I haven't used a lot of different distros, but for me, Debian has been a good balance of those factors. You may need to do more upgrades per decade, but the ones that you d…

Alma/rocky give you 10 years. Ubuntu pro, rhel and suse too, but they are commercial options (some free offers exist).

So while debian is a great distribution, with 5y is definitively not in the top 5 of LTS distributions.

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