15 ms·

FreeBSD 10.3 officially supported on Microsoft Azure

214 points by tachion 10y ago

avodonosov 10y ago
Microsoft is becoming a corporation of goodness? (Windows Subsystem for Linux, now that)
- akerro 10y ago
  lol nope. Azure is now another MS-made way of vendor locking software: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/07/microsoft_herds_users_to_azure_by_killing_vm_conversion_tool/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/07/microsoft_herds_user... >(Windows Subsystem for Linux, now that) That's also another monopolistic practice: 1. Not leader on a market 2. Make yourself compatible with the leader Examples include linux-subsystem, addon compatibility of Chromium, Firefox in EDGE.
  - NhanH 10y ago
    Assuming that they are NOT evil, how would their actions be different? Or is this a damn if you do, damn if you don't?
    - icebraining 10y ago
      It's more "damned if you did".
      - Bromskloss 10y ago
        "Damned if you done did it."
    - Longhanks 10y ago
      They are reimplementing the Linux kernel in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). It's easy for them, since they have access to the Linux kernel source code. The wine project or ReactOS reimplement NT and some of the WinAPI. However, they get no support at all from Microsoft. They could support those. That would be a gesture of good faith, in my opinion.
      - akerro 10y ago
        Completely agree, AMD, Nvidia support opensource, like by publishing their hardware spec for free, contributing to Linux kernel. Google does it somehow with GSoC and releasing tons of libraries. But really Microsoft? Did they do anything meaning? Did I miss anything? All they do is good PR and suits behind our backs.
        pjmlp 10y ago
        Since when are the NVidia specs available?!
        akerro 10y ago
        Since Linus told them fuck you https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-September/014480.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-Septembe...
        zxcvcxz 10y ago
        They just take take take from open source and give the bare minimum back.
        profquail 10y ago
        To name a few: * Haskell * F# * TypeScript * Orleans * Roslyn * Naiad * Chakra
        willtim 10y ago
        Microsoft research have contributed significantly to advancing the state of computing going back to the early 90's. So sounds like you have missed a lot.
      - orf 10y ago
        They are not re-implementing the kernel, they are doing a clean room (I.e no looking at the source) implementation of the system calls Linux supports.
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    >That's also another monopolistic practice: 1. Not leader on a market 2. Make yourself compatible with the leader Is this not, like, what half of the companies in the world do? If you were launching a new browser, would you not look to make it addon compatible with popular platforms? Of course Microsoft is playing catch-up! And where they are in the lead, they sorta leave it (look at C#). But I'm wondering what exactly you expect from any company, in general. I'll agree that Azure is a mess. A complete disappointment, especially since Dave Cutler's name was on it. Probably has some cool core tech, but what a pain to deal with, and expensive, too! Azure is more aimed at getting traditional companies paying MS monthly direct, vs their long chain of licensing for onprem. They'll make a lot of money. But against GCE? No contest.
    - icc97 10y ago
      Genuine question - is Azure a mess? Have you got any articles you'd recommend? I'd generally heard good things about it.
      - MichaelGG 10y ago
        In short, yes. The portals are a wreck. Every time I, or anyone I know, uses it, they are pissed off. It's just needlessly "Metro" and confusing. It's terribly slow, too. Machines take forever to startup. Their SSD story is a joke (requires special machine types on pre-sized arrays, instead of just a switch). It's far more expensive (2x to 10x GCE last I checked, depending on machine size). The networking is bizarre - all machines in a "service" share an IP. So their recommendation is to put SSH on different ports like 221, 222, 223, to get to a specific machine. Just silly. I really, really wanted to like Azure; it'd be good for AWS to have real competition. And I am very biased against Google. But GCE is just so superior. I suppose to see for yourself, try setting up a 3 node SSD Elasticsearch cluster on Azure and GCE. With GCE my experience is that it'll take significantly less time, even if you already know Azure and GCE.
- nowprovision 10y ago
  They are moving in the the right direction, but sometimes it seems one step forward and then two steps back. They were a gold sponsor of OpenBSD in 2015 but no sponsorship in 2016 yet http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html. Also on their own OS a recent experience of installing SQL Server Express shows are still very capable of inflicting pain and #clicknext arthritis.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  Yeah if you forget on purpose they act as patent trolls at the same time with Android, and try to make every file format incompatible with the previous versions just to ensure you keep being locked in in their products. And keeping a monopoly on PCs by having Windows installed by default everywhere. Oh, and the forced windows 10 upgrade. Is that all good for you?
  - NicoJuicy 10y ago
    Forced free upgrade. You don't want to know how much money they are losing with it, all because they want a shift to a newer OS. Which makes their platform more future proof.. Yes, it's forced, no doubt. But if i were Windows, i'd rather have a lot of people a free upgrade ( and unknowing users forcing to upgrade), then leaving everyone in the Windows Vista erra :)
    - userbinator 10y ago
      They are not losing any money, because Windows 10 is undoubtedly adware. It's "free" because you are the product, and they don't even try to hide this fact: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053622 (a default install of Win10 communicates with third-party domains of well-known ad-serving/analytics/tracking companies.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053352 http://betanews.com/2015/10/15/microsoft-now-uses-windows-10s-start-menu-to-display-ads/ http://betanews.com/2015/10/15/microsoft-now-uses-windows-10... http://www.extremetech.com/computing/204595-lock-screen-ads-on-windows-10-bring-us-closer-to-a-nightmarish-capitalist-dystopia http://www.extremetech.com/computing/204595-lock-screen-ads-...
      - yuhong 10y ago
        They aren't losing much money because most Windows sales are OEM sales. I recommend that you read this: https://hal2020.com/2013/03/07/what-if-microsoft-had-done-windows-8-differently/ https://hal2020.com/2013/03/07/what-if-microsoft-had-done-wi...
- mtgx 10y ago
  No. They do it for the same reason Google usually open sources stuff - to their own benefit. This is to give Azure a boost in customers and image, not because Microsoft "wants to help FreeBSD" or whatever. That only happens indirectly.
- jeswin 10y ago
  That pales in comparison to their hostility towards Open Source. They are maneuvering desperately to remain relevant among developers, but at the same time they're happy to appear on behalf of Oracle to claim that APIs are copyrightable. It would be in the best interests of the developer community to ignore them until they mend their ways.
  - curt15 10y ago
    >They are maneuvering desperately to remain relevant among developers, but at the same time they're happy to appear on behalf of Oracle to claim that APIs are copyrightable... ...while reimplementing Apple's proprietary iOS frameworks (https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC).
teamhappy 10y ago
FreeBSD is getting a lot of love recently. That's awesome.
- paride5745 10y ago
  Some of it it's a reaction to systemd hate.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - verytrivial 10y ago
    I prefer: Some of it is a constructive reaction to legitimate systemd concerns.
    - ezequiel-garzon 10y ago
      Take away "constructive" and "legitimate" and you become a diplomat.
    - apecat 10y ago
      FreeBSD is so very much worth taking a look at. Hardware support is not on Linux’s level, so it’s not necessarily an endeavor I’d recommend for desktop use, at least as a first 'nix experience, even with the super nice ZFS integration in PC-BSD. But if you’re at all frustrated by any aspect of Linux in server use, it’s worth having a peek at FreeBSD. And I’m saying this as a person who doesn’t really have much business talking about tools like dtrace or even jails. But I will argue that it’s the increasing wtf:ness of Linux that has held me back from wanting to become a more competent admin and more focused on IT work in my career. Blame the system, right? As a reluctant IT person and "advanced beginner" sysadmin, I was inspired to look into FreeBSD this spring. The final push had a lot to do with that massive, remotely exploitable glibc vulnerability (CVE-2015-7547), when the potential consequences of Linux monoculture started to really dawn on me. First thing I did was to migrate a couple of my Tor relay nodes to FreeBSD (instructions here: https://torbsd.github.io/ https://torbsd.github.io/ ). Whether my handful of <10 Mbit/s middle relays are real workloads or not is debatable, but it’s stuff I have a sense of duty about, especially with regards to doing basic security due diligence. Tor has a direct impact on real people doing real things, but it's not like these boxes keep me from working if they're down for a week, so it’s a good place to learn. After ten years on Debian and Ubuntu for server stuff, FreeBSD is quite refreshing. There's really a lot to love: human readable userland, man pages and scripts, the simplicity of throwing basic ipfw rules in /etc/rc.conf etc. Whereas stuff tends to "just work" on Debian (including automatic restarts of services after package installs), one needs to read the manual on FreeBSD. But everything feels like less of a pain to learn. And to be clear, the system doesn’t feel like a "tinker or GTFO" kit like Gentoo or Arch, starting with the installation process. After looking quickly at pf for more advanced networking stuff, I feel like I’ve been duped into believing that I hate networking, when it’s really the syntax of Linux’s iptables that is at fault. Another thing I definitely need is in-place upgrades, without the need to boot from media (like OpenBSD and NetBSD still seem to require). ‘freebsd-update’ seems to be stable nowadays. For the base system, FreeBSD seems to be moving towards a proper LTS model, where one is encouraged to stay on top of point releases. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991960 For third party software, packages seem to make a whole lot more sense than my expectations. I had heard that FreeBSD only recompiles all their packages every few weeks, but nowadays, it’s every three days or so. I have used ports on my Tor relays in order to be able to install security patches immediately. As a virtualization platform, I suppose Linux’s KVM remains a lot more mature and well supported. But the bhyve hypervisor seems to be coming along nicely. Before long FreeBSD might become a good virtualization platform. Personally, I can’t wait to see something like FreeNAS becoming a virtualization appliance, like the one you’d get with Proxmox or those QNAP prosumer file servers. From what I’ve seen so far, it seems increasingly frustrating that BSD didn’t become the major free 'nix platform back in the day.
attilagyorffy 10y ago
ha, funnily just one day before code freeze of freebsd 11 :) nevertheless it's great that freebsd is getting more attention these days.
gorm 10y ago
Wow! Legal Terms © 2016 Microsoft. All rights reserved.
- JdeBP 10y ago
  ... followed by the full text of the FreeBSD Licence.
  - 88ni223h2b 10y ago
    And? Still blatant copyright infringement: "THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY MICROSOFT 'AS IS'..." One of the purposes of the BSD license is to give the original authors credit!
    - ivl 10y ago
      Microsoft is distributing a VM image of FreeBSD through their marketplace in binary format, that has been modified to be used on their cloud service. The license they choose to distribute it under is completely harmless, and you're still sure to find the FreeBSD licence details inside the OS itself once it's running. There's no copyright issue here. Look at how literally any other VM image is distributed, on Amazon, GCS, Digital Ocean...
unixhero 10y ago
Why not embrace, extend, extinguish two flies in one fell swoop! Seriously though... No that was serious.
- zxcvcxz 10y ago
  In the 90's MS employed shills to spread in-fighting within F/OSS communities. If Hillary Clinton can still do it today with COR, there are no laws against it, and there is financial incentive to spread FUD, then it's likely still happening. Bill Cosby did awful things to women decades ago. We still hold him responsible for that. If he donates to womens shelters do we forgive him for the rapes he committed? So yeah as far as I'm concerned MS is a horrible company, especially if you value your freedom.
- arca_vorago 10y ago
  The HN crowd is changing. They don't want to hear about the importance of FOSS. I just got downvoted into oblivion for talking about eee, with the same old tired logical fallacies being thrown around (but what about apple!, but at least it's open source! but that was the 90s! microsoft is different now!)
  - dcgrant 10y ago
    Nowadays FOSS is a commodity written by useful idiots or persons employed by companies that use it for strategic purposes. It's unfortunately not only HN that is changing. Look closely what's happening in established OSS projects.
Philipp__ 10y ago
Thanks, but no thanks Microsoft.
berntb 10y ago
The slogan is really relevant today -- "Linux is for people that hate Windows, FreeBSD is for people that love unix". :-) I'm a Linux guy, but would be happy to do FreeBSD at work. To give the Devil his due, I must admit that Microsoft has done lots for the development of software. For instance, it is really hard to google the infamous "bloody monitor in bed" quote these days. A SEO triumph at Microsoft, worthy creating a chess/Go world champion AI? :-)
znpy 10y ago
I am always a bit surprised by comments that give Microsoft a bad reputation no matter what it does. The computer science field has always been "ruled" by ideas and philosophies, but in the end a company is a company, and the ultimate goal of a company is to make money. It isn't weird or evil that Microsoft is trying to make money using whatever mean it can use. By the way, it's crystal clear that a considerable Microsoft is pivoting to become a cloud provider and in that sense the most obvious thing to do is to provide developers with all of the tools they might need. Kudos to Microsoft for being able to perform such a direction change. Plus consider that competition usually means lower prices for customers.. We should be happy that new players are diving into the cloud business.
- aerique 10y ago
  Well, I don't know your age but a lot of us grew up during the 1990s and early 2000s and experienced Microsoft's bully behavior first hand while we were trying to make Linux[1], Free Software and Open Source more popular. That kind of trust is hard to win back. It may be childish but I've been enjoying Microsoft's fade into irrelevance the last decade. [1] Amongst other OSes.
  - l3m0ndr0p 10y ago
    I agree with your statement. I wouldn't trust MS to run FreeBSD on their hardware at all. What if they throttle the performance of FreeBSD without you ever knowing it? Embrace and extinguish has always been their motto.
    - cjg_ 10y ago
      Hotmail ran on FreeBSD for a long time. Why would they treat it anyway than Linux?
      - l3m0ndr0p 10y ago
        MS has every incentive to ensure that their Operating systems get the best hardware and show they are the more stable and scalable. I wouldn't trust an operating system company that runs a "server farm" where they have their own OS and competitors. Why would Microsoft run their competition on their own hardware & data centers? If Azure breaks off from MS and becomes an independent company, OS agnostic, then maybe they can win my trust back. I like Azure & would only use it for MS based OS, DB etc. I would never run, nor would I recommend any other OS running on Azure, ever. There are other "server farm" vendors that I can choose from for non MS based cloud computing.
vmp 10y ago
And yet they sadly still do not accept prepaid credit cards. :(
- kefka 10y ago
  Yeah, you know why, right? So they can screw you over with "Unknown until later" bills, complete lack of being able to control your funds and services, and what I call "Comcast Bills" (AKA: pay what we tell you and GTFO). Just read my previous comment (or the top one of this story). Doesn't even matter if you're an enterprise with a site license of 150k people.
  - res0nat0r 10y ago
    It's actually because prepaid cards are high sources of fraud that cloud providers don't want to deal with.
kefka 10y ago
Let me explain what recently happened while testing Azure RemoteApp. I was put in charge in comparing RemoteApp to our Citrix cluster, feature compatibility, and cost. Now, I'm part of a university so that's "negotiated". We're also part of I2, so data ingress/egress should be free as per our site contract. (Yeah, it amounted to $5, but we were billed for it against our current enterprise agreement). I worked with a MS Engineer to set everything up. I set cost limits to kill service if we go over $200 (past the free trial).... Well guess what? They only give emails, not kill service. Your account will still accrue no matter what. The engineer said that it could kill service. So, I had limits set to 'alert me'. Until 2 months ago. They switched what was the Beta Portal to the main portal. Doing this eliminated even my alerts I had. The account accrued around $2800, with NO emails, No alerts, and NO questionable billing calls regarding 'non-normal computing practices'. I'm finishing up a paper and a post-mortem regarding this incident. Obviously my university can absorb this, but the points stand: 1. There is no adequate way of controlling your bill 2. Billing calculations are done with many hours of lag-time. You don't know the zinger you just got until later. 3. There is NO fraud policy... Unless you count "Too Fucking Bad" as the policy.
- sillysaurus3 10y ago
  Did you try contacting them and asking for a refund? What did they say?
  - kefka 10y ago
    Oh yeah. I did that. 1 time through our executive agreement. That one was unresolved and marked as resolved. I then called again, promised that it would be taken care of. It was ignored after the 3rd email. I called again, and was given someone so daft that, even when requesting a manager, he refused. That incident went nowhere. I'm now on the 4th ticket. I might be getting somewhere... But again, they refuse to return calls and emails.
- jsingleton 10y ago
  The new portal is still lacking compared to the old one and they should have waited longer before pushing it IMO. I still find I need to go back to the old one for many things. Azure ML still uses the old portal. If you need to try stuff in the future you could use BizSpark. The best way of not getting charged is not to provide payment information.
pmh 10y ago
Blog post from yesterday about the release: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/freebsd-now-available-in-azure-marketplace/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/freebsd-now-available...
rbanffy 10y ago
I expected a new version of Microsoft Xenix since the 80's ;-)

214 points by tachion 10y ago

avodonosov 10y ago

Microsoft is becoming a corporation of goodness? (Windows Subsystem for Linux, now that)

akerro 10y ago
lol nope. Azure is now another MS-made way of vendor locking software: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/07/microsoft_herds_users_to_azure_by_killing_vm_conversion_tool/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/07/microsoft_herds_user... >(Windows Subsystem for Linux, now that) That's also another monopolistic practice: 1. Not leader on a market 2. Make yourself compatible with the leader Examples include linux-subsystem, addon compatibility of Chromium, Firefox in EDGE.
- NhanH 10y ago
  Assuming that they are NOT evil, how would their actions be different? Or is this a damn if you do, damn if you don't?
  - icebraining 10y ago
    It's more "damned if you did".
    - Bromskloss 10y ago
      "Damned if you done did it."
  - Longhanks 10y ago
    They are reimplementing the Linux kernel in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). It's easy for them, since they have access to the Linux kernel source code. The wine project or ReactOS reimplement NT and some of the WinAPI. However, they get no support at all from Microsoft. They could support those. That would be a gesture of good faith, in my opinion.
    - akerro 10y ago
      Completely agree, AMD, Nvidia support opensource, like by publishing their hardware spec for free, contributing to Linux kernel. Google does it somehow with GSoC and releasing tons of libraries. But really Microsoft? Did they do anything meaning? Did I miss anything? All they do is good PR and suits behind our backs.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        Since when are the NVidia specs available?!
        akerro 10y ago
        Since Linus told them fuck you https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-September/014480.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-Septembe...
      - zxcvcxz 10y ago
        They just take take take from open source and give the bare minimum back.
      - profquail 10y ago
        To name a few: * Haskell * F# * TypeScript * Orleans * Roslyn * Naiad * Chakra
      - willtim 10y ago
        Microsoft research have contributed significantly to advancing the state of computing going back to the early 90's. So sounds like you have missed a lot.
    - orf 10y ago
      They are not re-implementing the kernel, they are doing a clean room (I.e no looking at the source) implementation of the system calls Linux supports.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  >That's also another monopolistic practice: 1. Not leader on a market 2. Make yourself compatible with the leader Is this not, like, what half of the companies in the world do? If you were launching a new browser, would you not look to make it addon compatible with popular platforms? Of course Microsoft is playing catch-up! And where they are in the lead, they sorta leave it (look at C#). But I'm wondering what exactly you expect from any company, in general. I'll agree that Azure is a mess. A complete disappointment, especially since Dave Cutler's name was on it. Probably has some cool core tech, but what a pain to deal with, and expensive, too! Azure is more aimed at getting traditional companies paying MS monthly direct, vs their long chain of licensing for onprem. They'll make a lot of money. But against GCE? No contest.
  - icc97 10y ago
    Genuine question - is Azure a mess? Have you got any articles you'd recommend? I'd generally heard good things about it.
    - MichaelGG 10y ago
      In short, yes. The portals are a wreck. Every time I, or anyone I know, uses it, they are pissed off. It's just needlessly "Metro" and confusing. It's terribly slow, too. Machines take forever to startup. Their SSD story is a joke (requires special machine types on pre-sized arrays, instead of just a switch). It's far more expensive (2x to 10x GCE last I checked, depending on machine size). The networking is bizarre - all machines in a "service" share an IP. So their recommendation is to put SSH on different ports like 221, 222, 223, to get to a specific machine. Just silly. I really, really wanted to like Azure; it'd be good for AWS to have real competition. And I am very biased against Google. But GCE is just so superior. I suppose to see for yourself, try setting up a 3 node SSD Elasticsearch cluster on Azure and GCE. With GCE my experience is that it'll take significantly less time, even if you already know Azure and GCE.
nowprovision 10y ago
They are moving in the the right direction, but sometimes it seems one step forward and then two steps back. They were a gold sponsor of OpenBSD in 2015 but no sponsorship in 2016 yet http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html. Also on their own OS a recent experience of installing SQL Server Express shows are still very capable of inflicting pain and #clicknext arthritis.
ekianjo 10y ago
Yeah if you forget on purpose they act as patent trolls at the same time with Android, and try to make every file format incompatible with the previous versions just to ensure you keep being locked in in their products. And keeping a monopoly on PCs by having Windows installed by default everywhere. Oh, and the forced windows 10 upgrade. Is that all good for you?
- NicoJuicy 10y ago
  Forced free upgrade. You don't want to know how much money they are losing with it, all because they want a shift to a newer OS. Which makes their platform more future proof.. Yes, it's forced, no doubt. But if i were Windows, i'd rather have a lot of people a free upgrade ( and unknowing users forcing to upgrade), then leaving everyone in the Windows Vista erra :)
  - userbinator 10y ago
    They are not losing any money, because Windows 10 is undoubtedly adware. It's "free" because you are the product, and they don't even try to hide this fact: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053622 (a default install of Win10 communicates with third-party domains of well-known ad-serving/analytics/tracking companies.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053352 http://betanews.com/2015/10/15/microsoft-now-uses-windows-10s-start-menu-to-display-ads/ http://betanews.com/2015/10/15/microsoft-now-uses-windows-10... http://www.extremetech.com/computing/204595-lock-screen-ads-on-windows-10-bring-us-closer-to-a-nightmarish-capitalist-dystopia http://www.extremetech.com/computing/204595-lock-screen-ads-...
    - yuhong 10y ago
      They aren't losing much money because most Windows sales are OEM sales. I recommend that you read this: https://hal2020.com/2013/03/07/what-if-microsoft-had-done-windows-8-differently/ https://hal2020.com/2013/03/07/what-if-microsoft-had-done-wi...
mtgx 10y ago
No. They do it for the same reason Google usually open sources stuff - to their own benefit. This is to give Azure a boost in customers and image, not because Microsoft "wants to help FreeBSD" or whatever. That only happens indirectly.
jeswin 10y ago
That pales in comparison to their hostility towards Open Source. They are maneuvering desperately to remain relevant among developers, but at the same time they're happy to appear on behalf of Oracle to claim that APIs are copyrightable. It would be in the best interests of the developer community to ignore them until they mend their ways.
- curt15 10y ago
  >They are maneuvering desperately to remain relevant among developers, but at the same time they're happy to appear on behalf of Oracle to claim that APIs are copyrightable... ...while reimplementing Apple's proprietary iOS frameworks (https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC).

teamhappy 10y ago

FreeBSD is getting a lot of love recently. That's awesome.

paride5745 10y ago
Some of it it's a reaction to systemd hate.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- verytrivial 10y ago
  I prefer: Some of it is a constructive reaction to legitimate systemd concerns.
  - ezequiel-garzon 10y ago
    Take away "constructive" and "legitimate" and you become a diplomat.
  - apecat 10y ago
    FreeBSD is so very much worth taking a look at. Hardware support is not on Linux’s level, so it’s not necessarily an endeavor I’d recommend for desktop use, at least as a first 'nix experience, even with the super nice ZFS integration in PC-BSD. But if you’re at all frustrated by any aspect of Linux in server use, it’s worth having a peek at FreeBSD. And I’m saying this as a person who doesn’t really have much business talking about tools like dtrace or even jails. But I will argue that it’s the increasing wtf:ness of Linux that has held me back from wanting to become a more competent admin and more focused on IT work in my career. Blame the system, right? As a reluctant IT person and "advanced beginner" sysadmin, I was inspired to look into FreeBSD this spring. The final push had a lot to do with that massive, remotely exploitable glibc vulnerability (CVE-2015-7547), when the potential consequences of Linux monoculture started to really dawn on me. First thing I did was to migrate a couple of my Tor relay nodes to FreeBSD (instructions here: https://torbsd.github.io/ https://torbsd.github.io/ ). Whether my handful of <10 Mbit/s middle relays are real workloads or not is debatable, but it’s stuff I have a sense of duty about, especially with regards to doing basic security due diligence. Tor has a direct impact on real people doing real things, but it's not like these boxes keep me from working if they're down for a week, so it’s a good place to learn. After ten years on Debian and Ubuntu for server stuff, FreeBSD is quite refreshing. There's really a lot to love: human readable userland, man pages and scripts, the simplicity of throwing basic ipfw rules in /etc/rc.conf etc. Whereas stuff tends to "just work" on Debian (including automatic restarts of services after package installs), one needs to read the manual on FreeBSD. But everything feels like less of a pain to learn. And to be clear, the system doesn’t feel like a "tinker or GTFO" kit like Gentoo or Arch, starting with the installation process. After looking quickly at pf for more advanced networking stuff, I feel like I’ve been duped into believing that I hate networking, when it’s really the syntax of Linux’s iptables that is at fault. Another thing I definitely need is in-place upgrades, without the need to boot from media (like OpenBSD and NetBSD still seem to require). ‘freebsd-update’ seems to be stable nowadays. For the base system, FreeBSD seems to be moving towards a proper LTS model, where one is encouraged to stay on top of point releases. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991960 For third party software, packages seem to make a whole lot more sense than my expectations. I had heard that FreeBSD only recompiles all their packages every few weeks, but nowadays, it’s every three days or so. I have used ports on my Tor relays in order to be able to install security patches immediately. As a virtualization platform, I suppose Linux’s KVM remains a lot more mature and well supported. But the bhyve hypervisor seems to be coming along nicely. Before long FreeBSD might become a good virtualization platform. Personally, I can’t wait to see something like FreeNAS becoming a virtualization appliance, like the one you’d get with Proxmox or those QNAP prosumer file servers. From what I’ve seen so far, it seems increasingly frustrating that BSD didn’t become the major free 'nix platform back in the day.

attilagyorffy 10y ago

ha, funnily just one day before code freeze of freebsd 11 :) nevertheless it's great that freebsd is getting more attention these days.

gorm 10y ago

JdeBP 10y ago
... followed by the full text of the FreeBSD Licence.
- 88ni223h2b 10y ago
  And? Still blatant copyright infringement: "THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY MICROSOFT 'AS IS'..." One of the purposes of the BSD license is to give the original authors credit!
  - ivl 10y ago
    Microsoft is distributing a VM image of FreeBSD through their marketplace in binary format, that has been modified to be used on their cloud service. The license they choose to distribute it under is completely harmless, and you're still sure to find the FreeBSD licence details inside the OS itself once it's running. There's no copyright issue here. Look at how literally any other VM image is distributed, on Amazon, GCS, Digital Ocean...

unixhero 10y ago

Why not embrace, extend, extinguish two flies in one fell swoop! Seriously though... No that was serious.

zxcvcxz 10y ago
In the 90's MS employed shills to spread in-fighting within F/OSS communities. If Hillary Clinton can still do it today with COR, there are no laws against it, and there is financial incentive to spread FUD, then it's likely still happening. Bill Cosby did awful things to women decades ago. We still hold him responsible for that. If he donates to womens shelters do we forgive him for the rapes he committed? So yeah as far as I'm concerned MS is a horrible company, especially if you value your freedom.
arca_vorago 10y ago
The HN crowd is changing. They don't want to hear about the importance of FOSS. I just got downvoted into oblivion for talking about eee, with the same old tired logical fallacies being thrown around (but what about apple!, but at least it's open source! but that was the 90s! microsoft is different now!)
- dcgrant 10y ago
  Nowadays FOSS is a commodity written by useful idiots or persons employed by companies that use it for strategic purposes. It's unfortunately not only HN that is changing. Look closely what's happening in established OSS projects.

Philipp__ 10y ago

Thanks, but no thanks Microsoft.

berntb 10y ago

The slogan is really relevant today -- "Linux is for people that hate Windows, FreeBSD is for people that love unix". :-) I'm a Linux guy, but would be happy to do FreeBSD at work. To give the Devil his due, I must admit that Microsoft has done lots for the development of software. For instance, it is really hard to google the infamous "bloody monitor in bed" quote these days. A SEO triumph at Microsoft, worthy creating a chess/Go world champion AI? :-)

znpy 10y ago

I am always a bit surprised by comments that give Microsoft a bad reputation no matter what it does. The computer science field has always been "ruled" by ideas and philosophies, but in the end a company is a company, and the ultimate goal of a company is to make money. It isn't weird or evil that Microsoft is trying to make money using whatever mean it can use. By the way, it's crystal clear that a considerable Microsoft is pivoting to become a cloud provider and in that sense the most obvious thing to do is to provide developers with all of the tools they might need. Kudos to Microsoft for being able to perform such a direction change. Plus consider that competition usually means lower prices for customers.. We should be happy that new players are diving into the cloud business.

aerique 10y ago
Well, I don't know your age but a lot of us grew up during the 1990s and early 2000s and experienced Microsoft's bully behavior first hand while we were trying to make Linux[1], Free Software and Open Source more popular. That kind of trust is hard to win back. It may be childish but I've been enjoying Microsoft's fade into irrelevance the last decade. [1] Amongst other OSes.
- l3m0ndr0p 10y ago
  I agree with your statement. I wouldn't trust MS to run FreeBSD on their hardware at all. What if they throttle the performance of FreeBSD without you ever knowing it? Embrace and extinguish has always been their motto.
  - cjg_ 10y ago
    Hotmail ran on FreeBSD for a long time. Why would they treat it anyway than Linux?
    - l3m0ndr0p 10y ago
      MS has every incentive to ensure that their Operating systems get the best hardware and show they are the more stable and scalable. I wouldn't trust an operating system company that runs a "server farm" where they have their own OS and competitors. Why would Microsoft run their competition on their own hardware & data centers? If Azure breaks off from MS and becomes an independent company, OS agnostic, then maybe they can win my trust back. I like Azure & would only use it for MS based OS, DB etc. I would never run, nor would I recommend any other OS running on Azure, ever. There are other "server farm" vendors that I can choose from for non MS based cloud computing.

vmp 10y ago

And yet they sadly still do not accept prepaid credit cards. :(

kefka 10y ago
Yeah, you know why, right? So they can screw you over with "Unknown until later" bills, complete lack of being able to control your funds and services, and what I call "Comcast Bills" (AKA: pay what we tell you and GTFO). Just read my previous comment (or the top one of this story). Doesn't even matter if you're an enterprise with a site license of 150k people.
- res0nat0r 10y ago
  It's actually because prepaid cards are high sources of fraud that cloud providers don't want to deal with.

kefka 10y ago

Let me explain what recently happened while testing Azure RemoteApp. I was put in charge in comparing RemoteApp to our Citrix cluster, feature compatibility, and cost. Now, I'm part of a university so that's "negotiated". We're also part of I2, so data ingress/egress should be free as per our site contract. (Yeah, it amounted to $5, but we were billed for it against our current enterprise agreement). I worked with a MS Engineer to set everything up. I set cost limits to kill service if we go over $200 (past the free trial).... Well guess what? They only give emails, not kill service. Your account will still accrue no matter what. The engineer said that it could kill service. So, I had limits set to 'alert me'. Until 2 months ago. They switched what was the Beta Portal to the main portal. Doing this eliminated even my alerts I had. The account accrued around $2800, with NO emails, No alerts, and NO questionable billing calls regarding 'non-normal computing practices'. I'm finishing up a paper and a post-mortem regarding this incident. Obviously my university can absorb this, but the points stand: 1. There is no adequate way of controlling your bill 2. Billing calculations are done with many hours of lag-time. You don't know the zinger you just got until later. 3. There is NO fraud policy... Unless you count "Too Fucking Bad" as the policy.

sillysaurus3 10y ago
Did you try contacting them and asking for a refund? What did they say?
- kefka 10y ago
  Oh yeah. I did that. 1 time through our executive agreement. That one was unresolved and marked as resolved. I then called again, promised that it would be taken care of. It was ignored after the 3rd email. I called again, and was given someone so daft that, even when requesting a manager, he refused. That incident went nowhere. I'm now on the 4th ticket. I might be getting somewhere... But again, they refuse to return calls and emails.
jsingleton 10y ago
The new portal is still lacking compared to the old one and they should have waited longer before pushing it IMO. I still find I need to go back to the old one for many things. Azure ML still uses the old portal. If you need to try stuff in the future you could use BizSpark. The best way of not getting charged is not to provide payment information.

pmh 10y ago

Blog post from yesterday about the release: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/freebsd-now-available-in-azure-marketplace/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/freebsd-now-available...

rbanffy 10y ago

I expected a new version of Microsoft Xenix since the 80's ;-)