5 ms·

Who here uses FreeBSD in production, and what use-cases do they find it better than Linux for?

by yaseer 9y ago

titanix2 9y ago
The PlayStation use an OS based on FreeBSD. The licensing is the big differenciating factor I guess.
- vetinari 9y ago
  Panasonic uses FreeBSD in their TVs. Others don't, Samsung or LG for example use Linux. They don't seem to have a problem with licensing.
HugoDaniel 9y ago
I use it. My use case is: 1. After properly setting it up, do sporadic updates when necessary without worrying that the whole thing falls appart. Much better than Linux ;)
- acdha 9y ago
  What Linux distribution were you using – something like Gentoo?
  - HugoDaniel 9y ago
    I used a few in my past life as a bad sysadmin. Mostly Ubuntu Server's. Some Fedora's, some CentOS's, some Arch Linux. I never did try Gentoo in production servers though. And through the years I learned to dislike their hive-mind approach to problems with half-baked crippled solutions that get approved and merged to production because some untouchable dev/guru/mastermind decided that he alone was a significant sample of all linux users: - Forget about extending and improving ifconfig. Lets change everything and create a new command, afterall ifconfig is not that important,. - Forget about your system dir layout. Lets change it and mix everything up into / - Oops that kernel update completly screwed iptables... - Oops that kernel update somehow introduced packet loops in the network - Today I learned that I/O DoS is. - wtf systemd ? Now i have to read up on this new sh*t that they are pushing down my throat. Oh wait there is no documentation. - Don't get me started on filesystems... Anyhow, I find Unix systems very hard to manage and maintain, i mean we do have all these devops tools to automatically manage configs and programatically setup machines in a coherent way. Linux just likes to show more than others that it exists, and does it in very inappropriate ways.
    - vetinari 9y ago
      > Forget about your system dir layout. Lets change it and mix everything up into / Actually, everything is put into /usr, in / you have just symlinks. And there's a reason for that. > wtf systemd ? Now i have to read up on this new sh*t that they are pushing down my throat. Oh wait there is no documentation. One would say, that after 8 years you would be able to find the documentation. It has manpages too.
      - Drdrdrq 9y ago
        Also, while I still oppose systemd (because it's a monolith, because it reinvents logging and because... it comes from the people behind DBus :) I must admit that lately I prefer writing systemd units to making nohup workarounds. I never did grok init.d scripts and from what I've seen neither did lots of other people. So that's a big plus in my book.
        acdha 9y ago
        I’m not in love with everything about systemd but I’ve noticed that about 90% of the attacks sound to an experienced sysadmin more like the person making the claim has never encountered/ understood the need for that particular feature. Many people will talking lovingly about SysV init without any mention of the many things people did to hack around limitations or the downtime suffered because they didn’t. (Yeah, it’s not perfect but the rough parts can be improved and I’m looking forward to standardization meaning we never talk about daemonization, automatic restarts, or logging again)
        JdeBP 9y ago
        You have constructed the classic fallacious dichotomy between van Smoorenburg init and systemd. * http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/
- krylon 9y ago
  > After properly setting it up, do sporadic updates when necessary without worrying that the whole thing falls appart. Do not get me wrong, I love that about FreeBSD as well. But a good GNU/Linux distro can do that, too, say, Debian or CentOS. All of the free Unix-like systems are light years ahead of Windows in terms of not spontaneously mutating and breaking things. I always bite my tongue when people say they like Windows because it "just works", because Windows just as often "just stops" working for no discernible reason. And troubleshooting on Windows is so much more difficult, that surprisingly often, the "solution" is to wipe the system and reinstall everything.
  - terminalcommand 9y ago
    With the latest updates to Windows 10, Win has been working stable lately. The things I hate are: - The anti malware service executable eating a lot of CPU - Terrible, terrible terminal emulation even with the improved powershell window - The crazy amount of committed memory. Even if you have 16-32 gigs of RAM, the OS still writes pagefiles to disk. I used to hate that I couldn't customize the Desktop Environment to suit my needs. But with custom Autohotkey scripts it seems to me that sky is the limit. The windows subsystem for linux is buggy, nevertheless it is usable and helps a great deal. Most gnu software for example Gnuapl compile and work OTB. I've only witnessed one blue screen of death in the last month. I should also note that I'm using an 8th gen desktop machine I've built with minimal hardware. Even with Spectre/meltdown patches I didn't experience any trouble.
    - oblio 9y ago
      You can set Windows Defender to not proactively scan.
    - krylon 9y ago
      I only use Windows at work, where I also used to be the helpdesk guy. These days I spend most of my time programming, so I am somewhat out of the loop lately. BSOD-wise, Windows has been very stable for a very long time[1]. I am not a fan of Windows, but Windows crashing is a very rare event, and when it happens, in my experience the cause is either a) faulty hardware, b) buggy device drivers or c) crappy AV software mucking around in kernel space (over the last three years, almost all the Windows bluescreens I saw were due to crappy AV software). My work laptop has BSOD'd on me maybe once or twice in three years - and I am one of those people that rarely shutdown or reboot their systems. At the end of the (work) day, I put my laptop to sleep, and only reboot it when an update requires it or when it misbehaves very badly. So I am pushing the system pretty hard. I did not have much contact with Windows 10, yet, though. My work laptop runs Windows 7, and between Windows 2000 and 8.1, Windows 7 is the one I like best, so I am sticking with it for as long as I can. WSL sounds nice, though. And I heard Windows 10 finally got a native, builtin ssh client. > Even if you have 16-32 gigs of RAM, the OS still writes pagefiles to disk. This one has always struck me as odd about Windows. Linux or *BSD, given enough memory, will not swap at all until you push them. Windows seems to do it "proactively". I suppose it gets less annoying with an SSD, but my work laptop has a slow 5400rpm HDD. [1] I once saw a Windows NT 4.0 Server with six years of uptime. Personally, I shudder at the thought of a server that has not gotten any updates in years, but if that is not a concern, Windows is absolutely capable of accumulating that kind of uptime.
drewg123 9y ago
We use it at Netflix for our Open Connect CDN. In general, the FreeBSD performance is far better for our workload (we have served up to 100Gb/s from a single-socket CDN node). In fact, I'm sitting here reading HN while watching a single-socket E5-2697A machine ramp up past 92Gb/s for a 100% TLS workload.
- 2trill2spill 9y ago
  I hate to nag you. But whats the status of TLS sendfile? That feature is a great example of what FreeBSD can do, unfortunately it's still closed source.
  - drewg123 9y ago
    Yes, sorry. We keep getting busy doing other things. I'm actually working on getting it upstream now. I was testing some "before upstreaming" cleanups to make sure I didn't break anything :)
- geofft 9y ago
  Can I ask you what your network hardware is and how customized your kernel is (i.e., are you patching the network stack at all or running some vendor-customized drivers, or is it all in mainline)?
  - drewg123 9y ago
    We use fairly standard Mellanox and Chelsio 100GbE NICs. Except for TLS sendfile and our vectorized mbufs, most of the patches that we've been running have actually been to the VM system. Thankfully, due in large part to the recent efforts to scale the VM system upstream, a lot of our hacks are going away. We've got a blog detailing a lot of our work here: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/serving-100-gbps-from-an-open-connect-appliance-cdb51dda3b99 https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/serving-100-gbps-from-an...
Timothycquinn 9y ago
I use FreeBSD on my FreeNAS in Production. Makes an awesome box to have in a Small business network for all NAS services, backups and also lightweight virtualization for backend scripting and services. I could not recommend FreeBSD via FreeNAS more for these purposes. It just plain works. Almost all configurations can be done via Web GUI and rarely needs touching the root OS via commandline.
xiljin 9y ago
We use FreeBSD in production (SaaS accounting/payroll app) as a load balancing proxy/web server (Nginx) and outgoing mail server (OpenSMTPD) because it's a stable, proven OS with sane defaults. Thanks to OpenBSD, we get an awesome firewall (PF) and dead simple OpenSMTPD mail server (total config is around 25 lines which gives us DKIM signing and PKI with no additional software). At home, FreeBSD is used as a HTPC (Kodi), file server and backup box (it acts like a Time Machine for our Macs via netatalk and for Linux we use rsnapshot over NFS).
rsync 9y ago
"Who here uses FreeBSD in production, and what use-cases do they find it better than Linux for?" rsync.net[1] is based solely on FreeBSD. Our cloud storage platform is based on ZFS so it's a natural choice as ZFS is a supported and mature filesystem on FreeBSD. [1] As always, email for details about the "HN Discount".

Who here uses FreeBSD in production, and what use-cases do they find it better than Linux for?

by yaseer 9y ago

Who here uses FreeBSD in production, and what use-cases do they find it better than Linux for?

titanix2 9y ago

The PlayStation use an OS based on FreeBSD. The licensing is the big differenciating factor I guess.

vetinari 9y ago
Panasonic uses FreeBSD in their TVs. Others don't, Samsung or LG for example use Linux. They don't seem to have a problem with licensing.

HugoDaniel 9y ago

I use it. My use case is: 1. After properly setting it up, do sporadic updates when necessary without worrying that the whole thing falls appart. Much better than Linux ;)

acdha 9y ago
What Linux distribution were you using – something like Gentoo?
- HugoDaniel 9y ago
  I used a few in my past life as a bad sysadmin. Mostly Ubuntu Server's. Some Fedora's, some CentOS's, some Arch Linux. I never did try Gentoo in production servers though. And through the years I learned to dislike their hive-mind approach to problems with half-baked crippled solutions that get approved and merged to production because some untouchable dev/guru/mastermind decided that he alone was a significant sample of all linux users: - Forget about extending and improving ifconfig. Lets change everything and create a new command, afterall ifconfig is not that important,. - Forget about your system dir layout. Lets change it and mix everything up into / - Oops that kernel update completly screwed iptables... - Oops that kernel update somehow introduced packet loops in the network - Today I learned that I/O DoS is. - wtf systemd ? Now i have to read up on this new sh*t that they are pushing down my throat. Oh wait there is no documentation. - Don't get me started on filesystems... Anyhow, I find Unix systems very hard to manage and maintain, i mean we do have all these devops tools to automatically manage configs and programatically setup machines in a coherent way. Linux just likes to show more than others that it exists, and does it in very inappropriate ways.
  - vetinari 9y ago
    > Forget about your system dir layout. Lets change it and mix everything up into / Actually, everything is put into /usr, in / you have just symlinks. And there's a reason for that. > wtf systemd ? Now i have to read up on this new sh*t that they are pushing down my throat. Oh wait there is no documentation. One would say, that after 8 years you would be able to find the documentation. It has manpages too.
    - Drdrdrq 9y ago
      Also, while I still oppose systemd (because it's a monolith, because it reinvents logging and because... it comes from the people behind DBus :) I must admit that lately I prefer writing systemd units to making nohup workarounds. I never did grok init.d scripts and from what I've seen neither did lots of other people. So that's a big plus in my book.
      - acdha 9y ago
        I’m not in love with everything about systemd but I’ve noticed that about 90% of the attacks sound to an experienced sysadmin more like the person making the claim has never encountered/ understood the need for that particular feature. Many people will talking lovingly about SysV init without any mention of the many things people did to hack around limitations or the downtime suffered because they didn’t. (Yeah, it’s not perfect but the rough parts can be improved and I’m looking forward to standardization meaning we never talk about daemonization, automatic restarts, or logging again)
        JdeBP 9y ago
        You have constructed the classic fallacious dichotomy between van Smoorenburg init and systemd. * http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/
krylon 9y ago
> After properly setting it up, do sporadic updates when necessary without worrying that the whole thing falls appart. Do not get me wrong, I love that about FreeBSD as well. But a good GNU/Linux distro can do that, too, say, Debian or CentOS. All of the free Unix-like systems are light years ahead of Windows in terms of not spontaneously mutating and breaking things. I always bite my tongue when people say they like Windows because it "just works", because Windows just as often "just stops" working for no discernible reason. And troubleshooting on Windows is so much more difficult, that surprisingly often, the "solution" is to wipe the system and reinstall everything.
- terminalcommand 9y ago
  With the latest updates to Windows 10, Win has been working stable lately. The things I hate are: - The anti malware service executable eating a lot of CPU - Terrible, terrible terminal emulation even with the improved powershell window - The crazy amount of committed memory. Even if you have 16-32 gigs of RAM, the OS still writes pagefiles to disk. I used to hate that I couldn't customize the Desktop Environment to suit my needs. But with custom Autohotkey scripts it seems to me that sky is the limit. The windows subsystem for linux is buggy, nevertheless it is usable and helps a great deal. Most gnu software for example Gnuapl compile and work OTB. I've only witnessed one blue screen of death in the last month. I should also note that I'm using an 8th gen desktop machine I've built with minimal hardware. Even with Spectre/meltdown patches I didn't experience any trouble.
  - oblio 9y ago
    You can set Windows Defender to not proactively scan.
  - krylon 9y ago
    I only use Windows at work, where I also used to be the helpdesk guy. These days I spend most of my time programming, so I am somewhat out of the loop lately. BSOD-wise, Windows has been very stable for a very long time[1]. I am not a fan of Windows, but Windows crashing is a very rare event, and when it happens, in my experience the cause is either a) faulty hardware, b) buggy device drivers or c) crappy AV software mucking around in kernel space (over the last three years, almost all the Windows bluescreens I saw were due to crappy AV software). My work laptop has BSOD'd on me maybe once or twice in three years - and I am one of those people that rarely shutdown or reboot their systems. At the end of the (work) day, I put my laptop to sleep, and only reboot it when an update requires it or when it misbehaves very badly. So I am pushing the system pretty hard. I did not have much contact with Windows 10, yet, though. My work laptop runs Windows 7, and between Windows 2000 and 8.1, Windows 7 is the one I like best, so I am sticking with it for as long as I can. WSL sounds nice, though. And I heard Windows 10 finally got a native, builtin ssh client. > Even if you have 16-32 gigs of RAM, the OS still writes pagefiles to disk. This one has always struck me as odd about Windows. Linux or *BSD, given enough memory, will not swap at all until you push them. Windows seems to do it "proactively". I suppose it gets less annoying with an SSD, but my work laptop has a slow 5400rpm HDD. [1] I once saw a Windows NT 4.0 Server with six years of uptime. Personally, I shudder at the thought of a server that has not gotten any updates in years, but if that is not a concern, Windows is absolutely capable of accumulating that kind of uptime.

drewg123 9y ago

We use it at Netflix for our Open Connect CDN. In general, the FreeBSD performance is far better for our workload (we have served up to 100Gb/s from a single-socket CDN node). In fact, I'm sitting here reading HN while watching a single-socket E5-2697A machine ramp up past 92Gb/s for a 100% TLS workload.

2trill2spill 9y ago
I hate to nag you. But whats the status of TLS sendfile? That feature is a great example of what FreeBSD can do, unfortunately it's still closed source.
- drewg123 9y ago
  Yes, sorry. We keep getting busy doing other things. I'm actually working on getting it upstream now. I was testing some "before upstreaming" cleanups to make sure I didn't break anything :)
geofft 9y ago
Can I ask you what your network hardware is and how customized your kernel is (i.e., are you patching the network stack at all or running some vendor-customized drivers, or is it all in mainline)?
- drewg123 9y ago
  We use fairly standard Mellanox and Chelsio 100GbE NICs. Except for TLS sendfile and our vectorized mbufs, most of the patches that we've been running have actually been to the VM system. Thankfully, due in large part to the recent efforts to scale the VM system upstream, a lot of our hacks are going away. We've got a blog detailing a lot of our work here: https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/serving-100-gbps-from-an-open-connect-appliance-cdb51dda3b99 https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/serving-100-gbps-from-an...

Timothycquinn 9y ago

I use FreeBSD on my FreeNAS in Production. Makes an awesome box to have in a Small business network for all NAS services, backups and also lightweight virtualization for backend scripting and services. I could not recommend FreeBSD via FreeNAS more for these purposes. It just plain works. Almost all configurations can be done via Web GUI and rarely needs touching the root OS via commandline.

xiljin 9y ago

We use FreeBSD in production (SaaS accounting/payroll app) as a load balancing proxy/web server (Nginx) and outgoing mail server (OpenSMTPD) because it's a stable, proven OS with sane defaults. Thanks to OpenBSD, we get an awesome firewall (PF) and dead simple OpenSMTPD mail server (total config is around 25 lines which gives us DKIM signing and PKI with no additional software). At home, FreeBSD is used as a HTPC (Kodi), file server and backup box (it acts like a Time Machine for our Macs via netatalk and for Linux we use rsnapshot over NFS).

rsync 9y ago

"Who here uses FreeBSD in production, and what use-cases do they find it better than Linux for?" rsync.net[1] is based solely on FreeBSD. Our cloud storage platform is based on ZFS so it's a natural choice as ZFS is a supported and mature filesystem on FreeBSD. [1] As always, email for details about the "HN Discount".