Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

crocidb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 241 posts

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

#51

Post by not_kurt_godel »

vsgherzi wrote: post #42
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make it zero deploy steps beyond git push with CodePipeline, and vibecoding makes the annoying config setup trivial if you know like 20% of what you're doing. There is really zero reason to be using a VPS for this unless you hate money, want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets.

This is a blog.... you don't need some monster machine. You can server TONS of people off the smallest Digital Ocean instance. Many of these small VPSs can be had for less than a couple bucks a month. Tons of popular influencers run their own machines for their blog. insinuating that it's unsafe to run your own machine is insanity. I don't understand this mindset of being scared to run your own stuff. Especially if y…

We have had something vastly better than an individual computer since idk, the mid 90s, called a CDN.

I guess if you want to call being informed about the online threat landscape "scared", that's your perogative. For me, it's common sense to avoid completely unnecessary threat vectors to my digital infrastructure, but power to you if you like dealing with extra maintenance overhead and constantly wondering whether you're providing free cryptomining to some random international criminal.

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

#52

Post by Lammy »

adamddev1 wrote: post #29

I enjoyed my foray into trying FreeBSD for my personal server. There's something cool, clean, simple and "punk rock" about it. But I gave up as my main pain points were: - PM2 was buggy on FreeBSD, which I used to manage my processes - An alternative, using `rc.d` to run daemons was just so hard to get logs working. - The firewall required too much self configuration to get it right with all the best security practic…

> I was missing something like a template with the defaults that come with UFW, for instance.

FreeBSD does include this! It's implemented using IPFW instead of PF. Check out `firewall_type` key in `rc.conf`: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/libexec/rc/rc.conf?id=8e08...

For a very easy single-machine firewall, one could set `firewall_type=client` or `firewall_type=workstation` if you want to host anything. For the latter, `firewall_myservices` and `firewall_allowservices` control what ports are enabled and who (other networks/IPs) have access to them.

For a very simple NAT gateway, one could set `firewall_type=simple` and then `firewall_simple_(iif|inet|oif|onet)(_ipv6)?` to configure the ISP-side and internal-side interface names and IPv4 and IPv6 network ranges for each.

For more details and to see exactly what each option actually does, check out `/etc/rc.firewall` where this is all implemented: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/libexec/rc/rc.firewall?id=...

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

#53

Post by nextos »

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.

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

#54

Post by delicious_apple »

andix wrote: post #17
pm2222 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I need to enable automatic updates, because I don't have the time to manually update. I have a few machines on Open SuSE Tubleweed, and stuff just randomly breaks. A few months ago there was a weird Kernel bug that just froze all of them. They update and reboot every day, and suddenly it all worked well again. A bit too exciting for me :)

You can always try openSUSE Slowroll (in beta), which is a rolling release that updates less frequently than Tumbleweed. It advertises better stability.

https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Slowroll

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

#55

Post by Enginerrrd »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #5
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?

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…

Ive had nothing but issues doing that. I think I’ve had a Debian upgrade actually succeed maybe one time? (After some manual intervention to fix some issue other booting on my work server)

For updates, Debian and Ubuntu are great. For upgrades… not so much for me.

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

#56

Post by sgc »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #30
jvanderbot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s3 + cloudfront takes approximately 2 extra steps every deploy, and about 10 extra steps that are easy to screw up at setup time. It's not a trivial drop-in, but yes, once it's done it's _really_ done.

You can make it zero deploy steps beyond git push with CodePipeline, and vibecoding makes the annoying config setup trivial if you know like 20% of what you're doing. There is really zero reason to be using a VPS for this unless you hate money, want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets.

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.

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

#57

Post by indigodaddy »

rob wrote: post #6

I've switched to Debian (and since Ubuntu) for my server needs but I remember being obsessed in the mid 2000s with FreeBSD when I was younger. I would spend more time configuring and setting them up than doing anything actually useful on them. It used to be hard to find dedicated servers or VPSs with any of the BSDs, I think I settled on Panix.com or something? Before that I remember some company called 15MinuteServe…

OVH has FreeBSD templates. And most KVM VM/VPS providers will allow console access and mount custom ISO to install whatever you want.

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

#58

Post by doubled112 »

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.

You can use the free developer subscription for documentation even if you don't plan to use your 16 RHEL licenses.

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

#59

Post by not_kurt_godel »

sgc wrote: post #56
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make it zero deploy steps beyond git push with CodePipeline, and vibecoding makes the annoying config setup trivial if you know like 20% of what you're doing. There is really zero reason to be using a VPS for this unless you hate money, want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets.

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.

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

#60

Post by roblh »

adamddev1 wrote: post #29

I enjoyed my foray into trying FreeBSD for my personal server. There's something cool, clean, simple and "punk rock" about it. But I gave up as my main pain points were: - PM2 was buggy on FreeBSD, which I used to manage my processes - An alternative, using `rc.d` to run daemons was just so hard to get logs working. - The firewall required too much self configuration to get it right with all the best security practic…

pm2 has been buggy every time I’ve used it, no matter the OS. Incredibly convenient to begin with but simultaneously unpleasant to use software. Updating environment variables with a deployment has not once ever worked as intended.
Post reply on HN