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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

#71

Post by not_kurt_godel »

toast0 wrote: post #46
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #25

Boggles my mind that people pay money to host hugo static sites on a VPS, which is objectively inferior and harder in every meaningful way compared to hosting for free on GitHub pages or S3+CloudFront.

I pay $35/month for a dedicated server for my nothing webpages. One the one hand, I could really host at home for $0/month extra. Or on a VPS for $5/month. I do need my own thing because I run a network testing tool that needs some amount of direct access. On the other hand, dedicated servers are more fun, even if the cpus I get for $35/month are ancient. Is it $30/month fun? Probably not, but it's near zero given my…

Good on ya. Personally I'm happier with my extra ~$6k, sparing of however many hours of pointless maintenance work over the years, and 100% uptime over past/present/future even if I go into a coma.

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

#72

Post by nine_k »

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.

Indeed, for a VM, high uptime makes little sense, because a reboot takes a few seconds, and an upgrade requires no downtime, just switching the DNS to a new instance.

For a physical machine which you can't easily copy, it's a different story.

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

#73

Post by indemnity »

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.

I run nixOS as well on my home infrastructure (gateway/firewall, a couple of internal servers).

But I have had, uh, non-trivial breakages happen also when I upgrade the system itself to the next yearly release. Non-bootable kernel kind of breakages.

But I will give you that I can just boot from the generation before the upgrade, and it works again. So there's that :)

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

#74

Post by not_kurt_godel »

qmr wrote: post #65
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 broken take for so many reasons. Also service monitoring is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

I listed my reasons, feel free to provide your own. I've done enough security, ops, and oncall professionally that I have zero desire to do extra in my free time. Power to you if want to do otherwise and/or post references to "deskilling" while advocating an outdated inefficient approach to long-solved problems.

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

#75

Post by pull_my_finger »

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?

[dead]

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

#76

Post by not_kurt_godel »

vsgherzi wrote: post #61
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

There's threats on the internet, so don't spin up servers? Idk am I reading into that unfairly? That seems pretty fear mongering to me. Lots of engineering goes into making things safe for engineers to build on. Of course you can also just use squarespace and not worry about it at all. Perhaps my security posture is just not as intense as yours but I'm really just not super concerned my blog is going to get pwned. If…

Servers are work, including security overhead, so yes, don't spin them up if there is an alternative solution that is superior in every way except for not being able to churn digital butter.

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

#77

Post by pull_my_finger »

bitbasher wrote: post #31

I recently switched from Debian based servers to OpenBSD and I have never been happier. I wish I would have done it much, much earlier.

Can you detail the transition? What were the pain points? I feel like you lose a lot of the selling point of OpenBSD as soon as you start pulling from ports, but how could you do anything productive without it

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

#78

Post by bfivyvysj »

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 started putting things in a big ansible playbook repo. Don't need to have it fully managed by ansible either I mostly just have setup configured there I still do lots of by hand management.

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

#79

Post by nozzlegear »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #71
toast0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay $35/month for a dedicated server for my nothing webpages. One the one hand, I could really host at home for $0/month extra. Or on a VPS for $5/month. I do need my own thing because I run a network testing tool that needs some amount of direct access. On the other hand, dedicated servers are more fun, even if the cpus I get for $35/month are ancient. Is it $30/month fun? Probably not, but it's near zero given my…

Good on ya. Personally I'm happier with my extra ~$6k, sparing of however many hours of pointless maintenance work over the years, and 100% uptime over past/present/future even if I go into a coma.

> and 100% uptime over past/present/future

On GitHub?!

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

#80

Post by vsgherzi »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #76
vsgherzi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's threats on the internet, so don't spin up servers? Idk am I reading into that unfairly? That seems pretty fear mongering to me. Lots of engineering goes into making things safe for engineers to build on. Of course you can also just use squarespace and not worry about it at all. Perhaps my security posture is just not as intense as yours but I'm really just not super concerned my blog is going to get pwned. If…

Servers are work, including security overhead, so yes, don't spin them up if there is an alternative solution that is superior in every way except for not being able to churn digital butter.

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 CORS or other additions)

I was considering adding additional metrics to see who is hitting the server and how at the reverse proxy level.

This is all stuff I can't really do on a github pages blog.

I see what you're saying if you want set and forget that's fine, but like I said above it's a tradeoff.

The one server I have just has 80 and 443 open with nginx. I expect it to run indefinitely with little maintenance.

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