My favorite part of running a FreeBSD cluster was that you almost never had to reboot it. The kernel rarely changed -- most kernel settings could be changed on

My favorite part of running a FreeBSD cluster was that you almost never had to reboot it. The kernel rarely changed -- most kernel settings could be changed on the fly with a config file, and most everything else ran in userspace. We had boxes with uptimes over 700 days. Nowadays that matters a lot less, since you most likely have redundant hardware. But back then (in the 90s), hardware was expensive and more often than not you had one big beefy box running your entire website, so reboots mattered. I miss running FreeBSD. But for a long time you couldn't run it in EC2, and I never ran it as a home server, because at home I'm more interested in experimental things that usually show up on Linux first. But it was great what I was running enterprise on-prem hardware.