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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

#81

Post by gerdesj »

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.

"The biggest mistake I made was high uptime"

Quite. I'm old enough to remember machine uptime being a badge of honour.

However, being older and not really wiser, I look for service uptime these days. Yes we did have similar back in the day, that's why MX and the like DNS records exist.

Old school clusters were pretty esoteric but the lessons were learned (split brain n that) and that's why we still argue the toss with kiddies about why a Proxmox cluster with two nodes is fucked and why we recommend an additional "witness".

I don't care that VMware glossed over the whole two node HA cluster thing years ago with a massive bodge. They were wrong then and they are probably still wrong because that nonsense is probably still baked in.

Sorry, slight digression.

High uptime implies no patching. We all love patching.

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

#82

Post by stackghost »

tracker1 wrote: post #41

Personally, I've been running with Caddy in front of Docker (compose) for most of my personal/hobby usage. If it's a straight website, I'll let Caddy serve the contents directly... for "web apps" I'll pretty much containerize all the things and use caddy for TLS termination and reverse-proxy duties to the app running under Docker... Mostly ~/apps/appname, where each appname has a docker compose file, and the data dir…

This is more or less how I do it, too. Debating switching from Debian to something like Flatcar which is container-first with an immutable system/OS.

I think FreeBSD has some interesting technical merits, but like it or not Docker is the default for a lot of open source software, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to translate everything to freebsd jails.

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

#83

Post by arjie »

bfivyvysj wrote: post #78
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.

I have the same. The infra management is in one place, the apps hold their own, and there’s a docs folder on the server where each guy puts his stuff. The install is idempotent deploy scripts. But back then my stuff was more ramshackle.

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

#84

Post by HDBaseT »

otherme123 wrote: post #43
nightfly wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question is...why do you care that much? Not the OP, but I support Ubuntu as desktop and server OS for an engineering collage and have for 10ish years. Some LTS upgrades don't require many changes (mostly minor package name changes) and some take months of work to get rolled out (mostly for workstations, the server upgrades are usually quick.). Not everything gets upgraded every new OS release. If we had to upg…

I have a machine that has been Fedora since twenty-something to current 44, and upgrading yearly is a breeze. Three commands, and just wait for a download and the reboot. The only thing that breaks if you forget that the upgrade needs attention is the system Postgres, until I migrated to Podman images.

I recently upgraded to Fedora 44 from Fedora 43 and I wouldn't say its a breeze, it can be difficult, especially if you've enabled extra repos.

If you use Copr (Nvidia Drivers, Non-Free Stuff) you need to ensure all your Copr packages work fine in the next version of Fedora. A ton of packages haven't been updated for Fedora 44 and this will cause issues.

The same applies if you use Terra

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

#85

Post by andai »

gerdesj wrote: post #81
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.

"The biggest mistake I made was high uptime" Quite. I'm old enough to remember machine uptime being a badge of honour. However, being older and not really wiser, I look for service uptime these days. Yes we did have similar back in the day, that's why MX and the like DNS records exist. Old school clusters were pretty esoteric but the lessons were learned (split brain n that) and that's why we still argue the toss wit…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain_(computing)

The more you know!

>a Proxmox cluster with two nodes is fucked and why we recommend an additional "witness".

Reminds me of the three Magi from Evangelion: https://magi.kinta.ma/

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

#86

Post by not_kurt_godel »

nozzlegear wrote: post #79
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?!

S3+CloudFront. GitHub Page's mere 99.9999999% uptime is only for the weak-minded, of course.

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

#87

Post by not_kurt_godel »

vsgherzi wrote: post #80
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 COR…

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'd zero-day, or finding out that my site has been down for 6 weeks because of some fucking stupid bug in the latest kernel patch or whatever.

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

#88

Post by ls65536 »

sgc wrote: post #45
coreyp_1 wrote: post #11

I'm in the same boat. I have 2 old servers that I let get "too" old, and now I'm afraid to touch them to update them. However, with some of the shenanigans that the Linux distributions are pulling around age verification/attestation, I'm considering bailing on them entirely. Note, I did try Artix, but when it broke last week after a restart (in which evidently something had gone wrong with an earlier kernel update),…

FWIW, I once abandoned an Ubuntu server for a decade, and managed to update it painlessly in 20 minutes. That same server is still running today, now with the latest LTS. I think I might have even started with Ubuntu 4, or perhaps 6, and it has been painless all the way through. Perhaps my slow upgrades saved me from early adopter woes :). I use Debian now much more. With all the supply chain attacks, Debian Stable f…

I have a machine that's on a Debian installation that I've been steadily upgrading, one Debian stable release at a time, since I originally installed it about a decade ago now. At one point I even copied the entire installation to another disk (just a "dd" from its original SATA SSD to a new NVMe one, plus some partition and filesystem resizing), and I've upgraded the CPU/motherboard/RAM at another time, and it just keeps going reliably. It's fun knowing that the origin of that Debian installation predates every hardware component it's presently running on (with the exception of only the case and power supply).

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

#89

Post by stldev »

The first time someone explained Docker to me I remember saying, "Oh, you mean a jail?". Not quite, as the article explains. :)

kqueue was a huge win too.

A huge thank you to the FreeBSD developers. I ran my first company for 15 years on FreeBSD with incredible uptime and resilience.

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

#90

Post by huflungdung »

stldev wrote: post #89

The first time someone explained Docker to me I remember saying, "Oh, you mean a jail?". Not quite, as the article explains. :) kqueue was a huge win too. A huge thank you to the FreeBSD developers. I ran my first company for 15 years on FreeBSD with incredible uptime and resilience.

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