4 ms·

I’ve posted it here before but the frustrating state of OpenBSDs filesystems is a big issue for me putting it into production.

CoolCold 4y ago
My first one would be "can I hire any reasonable sysadmin for that at all?" Among others - is it supported by any hosting vendor or I'll be forced to tinker with it myself without even cloud-init tooling?
- chungy 4y ago
  Honestly, any competent Linux or FreeBSD admin should adapt to OpenBSD easily.
  - doublepg23 4y ago
    Something tells me they’ll type “sudo” into the shell pretty fast and be very surprised.
    - CoolCold 4y ago
      I guess that's part of "adaptation" and for humans probably not a bit deal But I feel that would be the top of the iceberg - bottom part would be - how much of other tooling, say Ansible will fail? Homegrown scripts will fail? Amount of efforts seems to be very high for, let's say politely unknown and unclear benefits.
  - CoolCold 4y ago
    I'm honestly in much doubts here. To make it proper reply it must be lengthy, will try to highlight at least several points and keep it short. * finding FreeBSD guys, who probably the best match here is somewhat puzzle on its own * highly likely common approaches in modern world would fail - cloud-init, systemd units to be adopted, not even mentioning Docker/podman and highly likely monitoring/metrics tooling. Not checked, but very unsure NewRelic or Datadog are compatible => admins will not be able to use their previous skillset effectively * convincing people to join team of supporting OpenBSD systems can be somewhat tricky. I'm basing on my own feelings here - I'd rise the bar for salary 2 times and even that will think twice on should I spend my time on such experience * leaving performance alone, I bet it will require extra hardware planning instead of buying any Supermicro/HP/whatever server and be sure it's Redhat compatible. Must be very serious reasons to put yourself in chores of this sort. And reasonable admins must consider such risks and delays for rollouts of products in production So on.
- foodstances 4y ago
  https://www.openbsd.org/support.html https://www.openbsd.org/support.html
- yellowapple 4y ago
  > Among others - is it supported by any hosting vendor or I'll be forced to tinker with it myself without even cloud-init tooling? 1984.is has OpenBSD as an install option; that's what I use for my mailserver and webserver.
- knorker 4y ago
  Most clouds don't support it, but vultr.com does.
knorker 4y ago
Yeah. I don't quite remember now, but I think many of the packages don't work if you don't have a separate /usr/local fs, since the packages need wxallowed. Unless you want to enable wxallowed on / or /usr. Then of course there's the fact that they don't do journalling. It's not my expertise but if literally everyone is doing journalling instead of softdep, then maybe they're right. I've used OpenBSD off and on since 2.1, and I've experienced much more data loss on it than on Linux. So yeah I'm also not a fan of OpenBSD's filesystems. I feel like OpenBSD don't have enough staffing to do the right things (e.g. Wayland, Bluetooth), so instead they try to do what they can, but right. Which is fair enough, but will become more and more like retro computing for every year that passes.
- doublepg23 4y ago
  > journaling Yup, the journaling is the nail in the coffin for me. I scratch my head when people recommend it as a network appliance due to the data loss issues. > retro computing I kind of do use it in that niche. I enjoy finding the oddball hardware OpenBSD runs on with, at least partial, -current support.

CoolCold 4y ago

My first one would be "can I hire any reasonable sysadmin for that at all?" Among others - is it supported by any hosting vendor or I'll be forced to tinker with it myself without even cloud-init tooling?

chungy 4y ago
Honestly, any competent Linux or FreeBSD admin should adapt to OpenBSD easily.
- doublepg23 4y ago
  Something tells me they’ll type “sudo” into the shell pretty fast and be very surprised.
  - CoolCold 4y ago
    I guess that's part of "adaptation" and for humans probably not a bit deal But I feel that would be the top of the iceberg - bottom part would be - how much of other tooling, say Ansible will fail? Homegrown scripts will fail? Amount of efforts seems to be very high for, let's say politely unknown and unclear benefits.
- CoolCold 4y ago
  I'm honestly in much doubts here. To make it proper reply it must be lengthy, will try to highlight at least several points and keep it short. * finding FreeBSD guys, who probably the best match here is somewhat puzzle on its own * highly likely common approaches in modern world would fail - cloud-init, systemd units to be adopted, not even mentioning Docker/podman and highly likely monitoring/metrics tooling. Not checked, but very unsure NewRelic or Datadog are compatible => admins will not be able to use their previous skillset effectively * convincing people to join team of supporting OpenBSD systems can be somewhat tricky. I'm basing on my own feelings here - I'd rise the bar for salary 2 times and even that will think twice on should I spend my time on such experience * leaving performance alone, I bet it will require extra hardware planning instead of buying any Supermicro/HP/whatever server and be sure it's Redhat compatible. Must be very serious reasons to put yourself in chores of this sort. And reasonable admins must consider such risks and delays for rollouts of products in production So on.
foodstances 4y ago
https://www.openbsd.org/support.html https://www.openbsd.org/support.html
yellowapple 4y ago
> Among others - is it supported by any hosting vendor or I'll be forced to tinker with it myself without even cloud-init tooling? 1984.is has OpenBSD as an install option; that's what I use for my mailserver and webserver.
knorker 4y ago
Most clouds don't support it, but vultr.com does.

knorker 4y ago

Yeah. I don't quite remember now, but I think many of the packages don't work if you don't have a separate /usr/local fs, since the packages need wxallowed. Unless you want to enable wxallowed on / or /usr. Then of course there's the fact that they don't do journalling. It's not my expertise but if literally everyone is doing journalling instead of softdep, then maybe they're right. I've used OpenBSD off and on since 2.1, and I've experienced much more data loss on it than on Linux. So yeah I'm also not a fan of OpenBSD's filesystems. I feel like OpenBSD don't have enough staffing to do the right things (e.g. Wayland, Bluetooth), so instead they try to do what they can, but right. Which is fair enough, but will become more and more like retro computing for every year that passes.

doublepg23 4y ago
> journaling Yup, the journaling is the nail in the coffin for me. I scratch my head when people recommend it as a network appliance due to the data loss issues. > retro computing I kind of do use it in that niche. I enjoy finding the oddball hardware OpenBSD runs on with, at least partial, -current support.