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Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

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Re: Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

#91

Post by agapon »

0x457 wrote: post #35
asveikau wrote: post #9

ZFS is probably the biggest reason for me. I have a machine with a zfs pool running samba and nfsd. Philosophically I tend to prefer *BSDs over Linux. I have a few FreeBSD machines, one OpenBSD, and one Linux.

> ZFS is probably the biggest reason for me. Maybe in the past there was an argument for that, but ever since FreeBSD started using OpenZFS implementation...what's the difference? My ideal OS would be something like NixOS, but on FreeBSD and with better language than Nix.

ZFS is part of the OS on FreeBSD. Integrated more tightly in every respect.

Re: Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

#92

Post by throw0101d »

webstrand wrote: post #17
throw0101d wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> systemd is indeed awesome. i'd rather kms than go back to maintaining init.d scripts. systemd-as-init-replacement was probably fine. systemd-as-kitchen-sink can get annoying.

But where does the init system end and the kitchen-sink begin? For instance do you consider networking to be part of init or is it something else. For me, I bring network up in initramfs, so it's definitely part of my init. The only truly bad systemd-* I've worked with is systemd-journald. Which often fails to contain log entries that should be present or simply just corrupts itself.

> But where does the init system end and the kitchen-sink begin?

resolved, timesyncd, homed, journald, networkd (was very happy with Debian's interfaces(5)). Never thought of mounting file systems as process control, so also add mounting and taking over fstab. Given the ever-growing number of 'sub-systems', I'm sure new ones have been created that I'm not aware of. (I'm personally most regularly annoyed by resolved, especially as a server sysadmin where I need DNS to be deterministic, and not clever: I've gotten to the point of doing a chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf.)

I'm waiting for a systemd-mail so Zawinski's Law can be fulfilled:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law

> For me, I bring network up in initramfs, so it's definitely part of my init.

I've run Solaris, IRIX, BSD, and 1990s Linux, and I've never thought of networking as related to process control (init).

Re: Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

#93

Post by bluGill »

0x457 wrote: post #35
asveikau wrote: post #9

ZFS is probably the biggest reason for me. I have a machine with a zfs pool running samba and nfsd. Philosophically I tend to prefer *BSDs over Linux. I have a few FreeBSD machines, one OpenBSD, and one Linux.

> ZFS is probably the biggest reason for me. Maybe in the past there was an argument for that, but ever since FreeBSD started using OpenZFS implementation...what's the difference? My ideal OS would be something like NixOS, but on FreeBSD and with better language than Nix.

ZFS is a first class part of FreeBSD. you can use it on linux, but it will always have some rough edges. How rough it open to question though, for some it works well.

Re: Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

#94

Post by MisterTea »

E39M5S62 wrote: post #71
MisterTea wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ZFS is absolutely amazing, and FreeBSD supports it fully and without any of the "jank" you'd get running ZFS on Linux. This is why I use FreeBSD as well for my home server, first class ZFS support out of the box. Void Linux musl on my desktop. I had an old 2TB ZFS array that was part of a trunas setup kicking around for years. I needed to recover some files from it so I hooked all the disks to a motherboard and boo…

ZFS is a first-class citizen on Void Linux, too. There's a lot of care and consideration put into the kernel packages to ensure compatibility with ZFS. ZFSBootMenu is 'native' to Void as well, and the features it provides are quite far ahead of what FreeBSD's bootloader has.

I prefer OS variety and have a mix of Plan 9, Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD running my personal stuff.

Re: Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

#96

Post by toast0 »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #87
toast0 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I notice FreeBSD admins tend to follow a 'pets not cattle' approach, carefully nurturing individual systems. Linux admins like myself typically prefer the 'cattle not pets' mindset—using infrastructure-as-code where if a server dies, no problem, just spin up another one. I've worked at 'pets not cattle' and 'cattle not pets', and I vastly prefer pets. Yes, you should be able to easily bring up a new pet when you ne…

> But no, it's not really ok when your servers have an average lifetime of 30 days. It's very hard to offer a stable service on an unstable substrate. The whole cattle mindset because at the end of the day everything is a "unstable substrate" your building a stable service on unstable blocks pets don't solve the issue that each pet is fundamentally unstable and your just pretending it's not.

> The whole cattle mindset because at the end of the day everything is a "unstable substrate" your building a stable service on unstable blocks pets don't solve the issue that each pet is fundamentally unstable and your just pretending it's not.

That's not the way the world has to be. You can have a network that is rock solid. You can have power that is rock solid. You can have hardware that is rock solid.

Sure, if you have a couple thousand machines, a few of them will have hardware problems every year. Yes, once in a while an automatic transfer switch will fail and you'll have a large data center outage. Backhoes exist. Urgent kernel fixes happen. You have to acknowledge failures happen and plan for them, but you should also work to minimize failures, which I honestly haven't seen at the 'cattle not pets' workplaces. Cattle take about two years to get to market [1] (1.5 years before these people receive them, then 180 days before sending them to market); I'd be fine with expecting my servers to run for two years before replacement (and you know, rotating in new servers throughout, maybe swapping out 1/8th of the servers every quarter, etc), but after running for 30 days at 'cattle not pets', I started getting complaints that my systems were running for too long.

[1] https://cultivateconnections.org/how-do-you-determine-when-t...

Re: Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

#98

Post by toast0 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #88
toast0 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I notice FreeBSD admins tend to follow a 'pets not cattle' approach, carefully nurturing individual systems. Linux admins like myself typically prefer the 'cattle not pets' mindset—using infrastructure-as-code where if a server dies, no problem, just spin up another one. I've worked at 'pets not cattle' and 'cattle not pets', and I vastly prefer pets. Yes, you should be able to easily bring up a new pet when you ne…

I agree on the "knowledge stability" front. I feel like I have to relearn Linux server networking config every three years because I switched distro or a distro switched their network management middleware. But. Having tried to move a machine from rhel 5 to rhel 7, where 12 people had used the server over the past 8 years for any scripting/log analysis/automation, for hosting a bespoke python web request site and a t…

You can certainly keep information on your pets and how to rebuild them in source control along with all the procedures used to update them. It's probably a good idea.

Nobody says you can't do CI/CD with pets too. You do have to keep the pets well groomed, of course.

Re: Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

#99

Post by lstodd »

rollcat wrote: post #24

I have mixed feelings about FreeBSD. Some stuff is genuinely good: major/minor release branches, the best ZFS experience you can get OOB, actual man pages, overall a lot "cleaner" than most Linux distros. OTOH when you compare it to e.g. OpenBSD (or in many instances, even Linux), it's an actual mess. The default install leaves you browsing thru the handbook to get simple things to work; it has three ( three !) disti…

> I think it's nice that you can trace the lineage all the way back to 6.x

It's 4.0 actually - March 2000. For jails and kqueue.

Re: Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

#100

Post by E39M5S62 »

doublerabbit wrote: post #82
Klonoar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wifi? You mean the thing where people often resort to running a Linux VM to handle it?

I have had no issue with Wifi on multiple occasions. Works just fine nowadays without any Linux compatibility add-on. Wifi not being available isn't the fault of FreeBSD. If vendors actually gave open sourced drivers to their products and not locked behind a proprietary binary blob then we would be in a completely different world. I can recall when WiFi on Linux was pretty much non-existent until deals were made back…

Nobody said it was the fault of FreeBSD.
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