21 ms·

Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

334 points by msangi 2y ago

kev009 2y ago
I use Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all for fun, learning, and profit(the first two). At the very least it is nice to make acquaintance with at least one BSD because it will probably expand your knowledge on Linux in ways you wont be able to anticipate. For example, FreeBSD got me into kernel development, full system debugging, network stack development, driver development, and understanding how the whole kit fits together. Those skills transferred back and forth with reasonable fidelity to Linux, and for me jumping into Linux development cold would have been too big a leap.. especially in confidence and developing a mental model. For my personal infrastructure, I tend to use FreeBSD because in many ways it is simpler and less surprising, especially when accounting for the passage of time. ifconfig is still ifconfig, and it works great. rc.d is all I need for my own stuff. I like the systematic effects of things like tunables and sysctl for managing hardware and kernel configuration. The man pages are forever useful to new and old users. The kernel APIs and userland APIs are extremely stable akin to commercial operating systems and unlike Linux. There are warts. There are community frictions. The desktop story and some developer experiences will be perpetually behind Linux due to the size of the contributor base and user base. The job market for BSD is very limited compared to Linux. But I don't think it's an all or nothing affair, and ideally in a high stakes operation you would dual stack for availability and zero-day mitigation (Verisign once gave a great talk on this).
- cientifico 2y ago
  I completely agree! If you're looking to deeply understand how Linux works under the hood, I highly recommend trying out Linux From Scratch. It gave me invaluable insight into the system, especially when I first explored it 20 years ago. Building everything from the ground up—without relying on prepackaged distros or libc—was a game changer. Check it out: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
  - hggigg 2y ago
    I ran through that about 10 years ago. Not difficult for a reasonably seasoned Unixy person to run through but it quite frankly scared the shit out of me on the basis of how much stuff requires patching and hacking. Nothing fits together nicely. It gave me a whole new appreciation of macOS and FreeBSD.
- ab71e5 2y ago
  What sort of projects did you do to get into network stack and driver development on BSD?
  - tcmart14 2y ago
    Just commenting to express my interest also in the answer to this question.
  - kev009 2y ago
    I worked at a large service provider and had to fix bugs and improve performance in TCP/IP and Intel Ethernet drivers. I ended up really enjoying it so it became a hobby and consulting gig as well.
    - ab71e5 2y ago
      Awesome, you are kind of describing my dream job. Any particular hobby projects you are willing to share? I'm working on something myself trying to use eBPF/XDP offloading for a particular protocol
      - kev009 2y ago
        Lately I have been enjoying NetBSD on a EdgeRouter-4 (Octeon MIPS). I am trying to port some of the OpenBSD Octeon improvements like the MMC driver and maybe SMP support. On FreeBSD I have been pushing some changes to the 1, 2.5, and 10gbit Intel drivers that will decrease driver overhead a few percent.
- graemep 2y ago
  > tend to use FreeBSD because in many ways it is simpler and less surprising, especially when accounting for the passage of time. ifconfig is still ifconfig, and it works great. rc.d is all I need for my own stuff. That sounds very appealing to me. I have to keep a small number of servers running, but its not my main focus and I would like to spend as little time on it as possible. I have started using Alpine Linux for servers (not for my desktop, yet) because it is light and simple. Maybe BSD will be the next step.
  - nucleardog 2y ago
    The UI generally quite stable and well documented, which is awesome. They also have things like `rpm` in ports that you can install. Why? Because you can enable linux binary compatibility[0] and run linux binaries on it (this implements the linux kernel interface, it's not a VM/emulator). It's also backward compatible with its own binaries back to FreeBSD 4 (circa 2000). Though you may not need that as the ports/packages collection is pretty comprehensive. It also comes with some nifty tools built-in for isolation (similar to but predating cgroups/containers) as "jails". It also has a hypervisor built in (bhyve) for virtualization if you do need to run any linux VMs or anything for any reason. The way I usually sum up the difference to people is that FreeBSD is designed while Linux is grown. FreeBSD feels much more like a cohesive whole than Linux. Really, the only reason I'm not running it everywhere is that the industry has kind of settled on linux-style containers for... absolutely everything, and the current solution for that on FreeBSD is basically "run linux in a VM". [0] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/linuxemu/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/linuxemu/
    - ornornor 2y ago
      > Really, the only reason I'm not running it everywhere is that the industry has kind of settled on linux-style containers for... absolutely everything, and the current solution for that on FreeBSD is basically "run linux in a VM". That, and the wifi situation on laptops.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- sitkack 2y ago
  I really really enjoyed using FreeBSD. It isn't a distro but a full OS that you can and easily fully rebuild from source. The people are great, the tech is good. The CON is coming up, https://freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/event-calendar/fall-2024-freebsd-summit/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/event-calendar... Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit November 7-8, 2024 San Jose, CA
- torstenvl 2y ago
  Yeah, you know, a lot of us talk about FreeBSD being great because you aren't surprised by design choices—it mostly just makes sense. But I don't think we talk enough about the joy of not being surprised by updates. I'm about to do an upgrade from 13.2 to 14.1 this weekend and I am very confident that I won't have to worry about configuring a new audio subsystem, changing all my startup scripts to work with a new service manager paradigm, or half my programs suddenly being slow because they're some new quasi-container package format.
- knowitnone 2y ago
  I see the reason for dual stack but I would rather focus my efforts into securing one OS. If you buy into that, why not 3 or 4 different OSes?
  - hansvm 2y ago
    3-4 would be great. What would you pick for the rest in this day and age though?
    - gspencley 2y ago
      I'm still waiting for BeOS to make a come back
      - timeon 2y ago
        What is the situation with Haiku now?
        senorsmile 2y ago
        They just released another "beta" not long ago. It seems like it's getting closer and closer to being daily driver ready.
  - eklavya 2y ago
    Because tradeoffs and diminishing returns are a thing? For example having one backup is better than having no backups. Backups spread across earth, moon and mars would be better but probaboy not worth the cost.
  - kev009 2y ago
    It's an engineering tradeoff and market adaptation. If you are a typical SaaS provider the complexity may be beyond your capabilities and budgets.. allegory to a local delivery business choosing to build a long term relationship with a single vehicle manufacturer and dealer. If you are a high stakes service provider, you need to start thinking about how to get out from being controlled by a single vendor and market flux and plot your own destiny.. allegory to a national shipping carrier sourcing vehicles from multiple manufacturers and developing long term relationships with them to refine the platform.
- MuffinFlavored 2y ago
  > it will probably expand your knowledge It really just fragments my knowledge to be honest. Say "I gotta get things done". Get me to a terminal. You've got Mac OS command line flags, GNU, BSD. Great. Then it's some kind of asinine config to interact with some piece of software, all to achieve "generally the same thing", just a different way/flavor. I really don't see the benefits.
  - cientifico 2y ago
    It’s like driving a car. Most people can drive without needing to understand the internals, and it’ll still get them from point A to B. But just like some people enjoy diving deep into car mechanics, others enjoy understanding the intricacies of software. For me, that deeper knowledge is an advantage. It helps me quickly evaluate tradeoffs between databases, debug at the OS level, or dismiss a library still relying on select if I expect heavy load. This insight saves time and increases efficiency.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      And in the car analogy, it's other a diesel engine vs gasoline. The fundamentals are the same but there are some core differences, and it's just nice to know more stuff about everything.
    - kev009 2y ago
      Yes, and if you are a powertrain engineer (allegory for system developer) you'd benefit from knowing a variety of technologies in the automotive industry to be able to adapt to market conditions. If you are a heavy equipment mechanic (allegory for operator), knowing Cummins, Cat, and Detroit engines would be expected. For some reason computing professionals tend to be a lot more tribal and gravitate toward monoculture.
    - MuffinFlavored 2y ago
      I politely disagree. I love the driving a car analogy. You've got 2 kinds of cars overall really. Automatic transmission or manual. Get into any of them and everything is the same. Gas pedal, brake pedal, etc. Objective what you need to get done? Drive from A to B. It is impossible to drive from A to B with FreeBSD if all you know is Linux commands/syntaxes. That's my whole argument. That it isn't as mild of a jump as driving car A or car B. You are blocked (and need to throw out what you know on Linux for BSD because it'll collide). Are the differences mild? Sure, but enough to make you ineffective.
- v1ne 2y ago
  I also still use FreeBSD on my NAS. But after many years, the desktop experience was pretty sad and made me switch to Windows + Linux for my hardware tinkering. On one side, the lack of manpower shows in many places, unfortunately. I'm talking modern WiFi, GPU support, or power-save mechanisms. On the other side, many Open Source projects only support Linux and getting their projects to compile + run on FreeBSD was a pain, too. I mean, in addition to what kev009 mentioned, FreeBSD has so many great things to offer: For example, a full-featured "ifconfig" instead of ip + ethtool + iwconfig. Or consistent file-system snapshots since like forever on UFS (and ZFS, of course). I never understood how people in a commercial setup could run filesystem-level backups on a machine without that, like on Linux with ext4. It's just asking for trouble. So, I'm happy to see this thread about FreeBSD here! Maybe we can make the Open Source scene a bit more diverse again with regards to operating systems…
linuxandrew 2y ago
I've recently discovered systemd-nspawn which is an alternative to LXC, builtin and integrated into systemd. Much lighter than full VMs and it's quite similar to Solaris Zones and FreeBSD jails. One way to use it is to extract an OCI (Docker) image to a path, that way you can reuse the container tooling provided by Docker, Podman et al. I've barely touched the BSDs and it's been a few years since I last used Solaris so I can't make much of a comparison as a user myself.
- rtp4me 2y ago
  Thanks for this! I have been using LXC/LXD for a long time and never knew about systemd-nspawn. Time to go learn something new!
sylware 2y ago
I really wanted to give a try to FreeBSD... because I thought it was linux from "better" times... and then I saw they are tied to the tons of similar gcc extensions... and then I say to myself "why bother since it has the same major compiler dependency issue", better try to fix linux code base or start from there.
- ComputerGuru 2y ago
  It doesn’t, though? Gcc doesn’t even ship oob, the project itself uses clang, and almost all packages are also compiled with the system c/c++ toolchain.
  - sylware 2y ago
    llvm is not less worse than gcc... come on...
viraptor 2y ago
I like the idea and would like to learn more, but it looks like "migrated stuff without testing ahead of time and it turned out faster for some reason". Was it the memory allocations? Was it the disk latency? The hypervisor? Could it be replicated by other means? It was a fun read, but the reasoning/understanding was missing. I hope people investigate deeper before making changes like that. If you look for benchmarks comparing databases on Linux/BSDs you'll find lots of nuance in practice and results going both ways depending on configuration and what's being tested.
- draga79 2y ago
  No, after 20 years of use and comparative testing of similar setups. Frankly, I have always placed little importance on benchmarks as I consider them extremely specific. I am interested in real-world use cases. The goal of the talk and the article is not to urge people to migrate all their setups, but simply to share my experience and the results achieved. To encourage the use of BSDs for their own purposes as well. It’s not to say that they are the best solution; there is no universal solution to all problems, but having a range of choices can only be positive.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
erros 2y ago
Ladies and gentlemen, this person solves problems. Let it be known.
- knowitnone 2y ago
  he gave himself a pat on the back
thoroughburro 2y ago
> The largest failure was with btrfs — after a reboot, a 50 TB filesystem (in mirror, for backups) simply stopped working. No more mounting possible. Data was lost, but I had further backups. The client was informed and understood the situation. Within a few days, the server was rebuilt from scratch on FreeBSD with ZFS — since then, I haven’t lost a single bit. As someone who admins a lot of btrfs, it seems very unlikely that this was unrecoverable. btrfs gets itself into scary situations, but also gets itself out again with a little effort. In this instance “I solve problems” meant “I blow away the problem and start fresh”. Always easier! Glad the client was so understanding.
- lproven 2y ago
  > As someone who admins a lot of btrfs, it seems very unlikely that this was unrecoverable. As someone who used it all day every day in my day job for 4 years, I find it 100% believable. I am not saying you're wrong: I'm saying, experiences differ widely, and your patterns of use are not be universal. It's the single most unreliable untrustworthy filesystem I've used in the 21st century.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    The first time I tried it out about 4 years old, I bricked it within a few days!! It was on a new (to me) Linux distro or maybe an existing one but I heard it was cool and the snapshots sounded neat. I stayed away for a while but have it again on a Garuda install. I never completely give up on a technology, I hope they get it together.
  - AnonC 2y ago
    > It's the single most unreliable untrustworthy filesystem I've used in the 21st century. I think the “experiences differ widely” point makes sense with this comment too. Synology uses btrfs on the NAS systems it sells (there’s probably some option to choose another filesystem, but this is the default, AFAIK). If it were to be “the most unreliable untrustworthy filesystem” for many others too, Synology would’ve (or should’ve) chosen something else.
wombatpm 2y ago
U
rbc 2y ago
I've become a fairly loyal OpenBSD user in the last 3-4 years. The base OpenBSD load includes a substantial amount of network capabilities, and is cleanly implemented. It's almost too cleanly implemented, to the point of making me feel sort of guilty when I start to clutter up an install with a bunch of packages... If my needs for storage were more complicated, I would probably use FreeBSD ZFS, but UFS suffices for my rather modest needs. I use OpenBSD for desktop, web and mail services. There are some limitations, but none that are serious enough to warrant dealing with running another BSD, or Linux distribution.
nottorp 2y ago
If I want to run a BSD as just a file server - so I guess zfs + samba + bonjour or whatever the discovery protocol is these days - which BSD should I try?
- nanolith 2y ago
  I'd recommend using FreeBSD as your first BSD. It has a more recent version of ZFS integrated in the kernel than NetBSD. OpenBSD does not have ZFS support; it's a direction they chose not to take for security and simplicity reasons.
- whalesalad 2y ago
  TrueNAS
theamk 2y ago
> [users ..] began explicitly requesting “jails” instead of Docker hosts. They started using BastilleBSD to clone “template” jails and deploy them. huh, were they running persistent docker containers and modifying them in-place? If that's the case, they were missing the best part of Docker - the Dockerfile and "container is a cattle". The power of Docker is there no ad-hoc system customization possible, it's all in Dockerfile which is source-controlled and versioned, and artifacts (like built images) are read-only. To go from this to all-manual "use bastille edit TARGET fstab to manually update the jail mounts from 13.1 to 13.2 release path." [0] seems like a real step back. I can understand why one might want to go to BSD if they prefer this kind of workflow, but for all my projects, I am now convinced that functional-like approach (or at least IaaC-like one) is much more powerful than manually editing individual files on live hosts. [0] https://bastille.readthedocs.io/en/latest/chapters/upgrading.html#revert-upgrade-downgrade-process https://bastille.readthedocs.io/en/latest/chapters/upgrading...
tracker1 2y ago
I would differ on a small point. For SOHO usage, I think that docker compose is perfectly viable and often simplifies backup, migration and moving to a new server. Just my own take on this. A lot of apps really only need one instance with a good backup strategy and not hot failover instances and can handle an hour of down time once a year or two as needed, which I rarely experience. As mentioned in the article, it also serves as a decent set of instructions, assuming the actual dockerfile(s) for the services and dependencies are broadly available. You can swap out the compose instance of PostgreSQL for your dedicated server with a new account/db, relatively easily. Similar for other non-app centered services (redis, rabbitmq, etc). You can go all in, or partly in and in any case it does serve as self-documenting to a large degree.
knowitnone 2y ago
Running 3 different BSDs is not my idea of solving problems.
- KronisLV 2y ago
  They might be really good for specific tasks, but someone else will also need to maintain the setups, which will make things harder when most of the folks in the job market have experience with the various Linux distros, but finding BSD experience might be a tad more difficult. I am personally on board with using the various BSDs when it makes sense (though maybe just pick FreeBSD and stick with it, as opposed to fragmenting the install base, the same way how I've settled on Ubuntu LTS wherever possible; it's not ideal but it works), except the thing is that most job ads and such call for Linux experience in particular, same with tooling like Kubernetes and OCI/Docker containers and such. Ergo, that's where most of my time goes, I want to remain employable and also produce solutions that will be understandable to most people, instead of getting my DMs pinged whenever someone is confused by what they're seeing.
sangnoir 2y ago
I love it when the answer to a question posed in a headline is provided in the second sentence of the article. > I’m the founder and Barista of the BSD Cafe, a community of *BSD enthusiasts Did the original article change it's title (currently "I Solve Problems"), or did the submitter editorialize it?
bzmrgonz 2y ago
Awesome writeup, thanks for that, it really puts the bsd's in perspective of today's tech industry. What's the BSD version of k8s? You mention BSDs instead of k8s in the article.
nikisweeting 2y ago
I'm surprised no one is talking about FreeNAS / TrueNAS and their interesting history in this area in the comments. There's probably more collective writing about the various tradeoffs between Debian and FreeBSD in their forums and communities than anywhere else on the internet. Personally I love ZFS and ZFS on root so much I can never go back to not having it. It's a shame more cloud providers like DigitalOcean/AWS/etc. don't offer it natively.
phendrenad2 2y ago
Is BSD really significantly more efficient than Linux? The anecdotes here seem almost unbelievable.
ksec 2y ago
I dont think the article is even about BSDs, but generally really bad things in the tech sectors and philosophy to tech. >my priority is solving my clients’ specific problems, not selling a predefined solution. >It’s better to pay for everything to work than to pay to fix problems. >computing should solve problems and provide opportunities to those who use it. >The trend is to rush, to simplify deployments as much as possible, sweeping structural problems under the rug. The goal is to “innovate”, not necessarily improve — just as long as it’s “new” or “how everyone does it, nowadays.” >Some people are used to thinking that the ideal solution is X — and believe that X is the only solution for their problems. Often, X is the hype of the moment >When I ask, “Okay, but why? Who will manage it? Where will your data really be, and who will safeguard it?”, I get blank faces. They hadn’t considered these questions. No one had even mentioned them. >We’ve lost control of the data. For many, it’s unnecessary to complicate things. And with every additional layer, we’re creating more problems. Hopefully someday more people will wake up.
iluvcommunism 2y ago
FreeBSD is great as a server. Wifi performance still sucks. The author praised byhve but byhve is not all it’s cracked up to be. Both Xen and Linux virtualization perform better, VMware as well. I like FreeBSD, but the other day I found it still uses sendmail. Rc.conf is simple to use, and the ports system is great…I just feel the author was pushing his “X” solution. Hardware support is important as well. I’ve used BSD for a SAN, and FW. Would I use it for a virtualization host? No.
froh 2y ago
the title of the talk is "Why (and how) we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs" and that should be the title of this post too. I like that the blog post shares the slides, not just the video.
- dang 2y ago
  Ok, done. Thanks!
Borg3 2y ago
I wish he could write up a bit about XFS failure he had. Im using it from many many years and there is no issues at all.
- Tor3 2y ago
  I'm interested too. I'm using XFS only, and have for many years. On my own boxes, but my company also uses XFS for all the data on customer computers. We did extensive testing many years back, and XFS was the only filesystem at the time which gave a linear, constantly very high performance when writing and reading huge amounts of data (real-time data, dips in performance is a 100% no-no), and also not degrading when having huge numbers of files. We've never had a customer lose data due to XFS problems, and at this point I can't imagine how much data that would be, except that it's astronomical. When that's said, we had routine XFS losses on SGI boxes. That was a very well known scenario: Write constantly to a one-page text file, say, every few seconds, then power cycle the machine. The file would be empty afterwards. This doesn't happen on Linux, I vaguely recall discussing this with someone some years ago (maybe here on HN) and something was changed at some point, maybe when SGI migrated XFS to Linux, or shortly after.
- blipvert 2y ago
  Used it since the late 90s on IRIX, think there were a few issues early on with the endian swap, but no issues for the best part of twenty years for me!
- hggigg 2y ago
  I had one a few years back where we ran out of inodes on a Jenkins machine on CentOS 7 and it crashed and couldn’t remount the filesystem. I had to restore a backup which was time consuming on a 4TB volume with crazy amounts of files.
- lotharcable 2y ago
  It hard to know the timeline with his data loss, but I am assuming it was a long time ago. XFS is originally from SGI Irix and was designed to run on higher end hardware. SGI donated it to Linux in 1999 and it carried a lot of its assumptions over. For example on SGI boxes you had "hardware raid" with cache, which essentially is a sort of embedded computer with it's own memory. That cache had a battery backup so that if the machine had a crash or sudden power loss the hardware raid would live on long enough to finish its writes. SGI had tight control over the type of hardware you could use and it was usually good quality stuff. In the land of commodity PC-based servers this isn't often how it worked. Instead you just had regular IDE or SATA hard drives. And those drives lied. On cheap hardware the firmware would report back it had finished writes when in fact it didn't because it made it seem faster in benchmarks. And consumers/enterprise types looking to save money with Linux mostly bought whatever is the cheapest and fastest looking on benchmarks. So that if there was a hardware failure or sudden power loss there would could be several megs of writes that were still in flight when the file system thought they were safely written to disk. That meant there was a distinct chance of dataloss when it came to using Linux and XFS early on. I experienced problems like that in early 2000s era Linux XFS. This was always a big benefit to sticking with Ext4. It is kinda dumb luck that Ext4 is as fast as it is when it came to hosting databases, but the real reason to use it is because it had a lot of robust recovery tools. It was designed from the ground up with the assumption that you were using the cheapest crappiest hardware you can buy (Personal PCs). However modern XFS is a completely different beast. It has been rewritten extensively and improved massively over what was originally ported over from SGI. It is different enough that a guy's experience with it from 2005 or 2010 isn't really meaningful. I have zero real technical knowledge on file systems except as a end-user, but from what I understand FreeBSD uses UFS that uses a "WAL" or "write ahead log".. where it records writes it is going to do before it does it. I think this is a simpler but more robust solution then the sort of journalling that XFS or Ext4 uses. The trade off is lower performance. As far as ZFS vs Btrfs... I really like to avoid Btrfs as much as possible. A number of distros use it by default (OpenSUSE, Fedora, etc), but I just format everything as a single partition as Ext4 or XFS on personal stuff. I use it on my personal file server, but it really simple setup with UPS. I don't use ZFS, but I strongly suspect that btrfs simply failed to rise to its level. One of the reasons Linux persists despite not having something up to the level of ZFS is that most of ZFS features are redundant to larger enterprise customers. They typically use expensive SAN or more advanced NAS that has proprietary storage solutions that provide ZFS-like features long before ZFS was a thing. So throwing something as complicated as ZFS on top of that really provides no benefit. Or they use one of Linux clustered file system solutions, of which there is a wide selection.
vfclists 2y ago
> “If nothing is working, what am I paying you for? If everything’s working, what am I paying you for?” Bloke is not acquainted with Keynesian economics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OhIdDNtSv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OhIdDNtSv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO_tTnpof_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO_tTnpof_o All a man needs is food in his stomach and a place to rest at the end of the day. Everything else is vanity What proportion of global GDP is dedicated to fulfilling our basic material needs? It is mostly unnecessary. Inspite of the huge productivity gains made since the seventies, the current generation of young Americans are poorer than their parents and grandparents were at their age. So what does all the IT optimization bring? Just more wealth for the owners and redundancies for their employees, including Joe Bloggs here. It is time people in IT got to understand this. In the long term their activities are not going to improve their wealth. They are one of the few professions whose job is to optimize themselves out of a living, unless they own the means of the production their are optimizing, which they don't. It is their employers that do.
- consp 2y ago
  The problem with the IT crowd is they think they are ahead of the optimization curve, and since everyone does, nobody is.
- kortilla 2y ago
  The current generation of Americans are absolutely rich enough to just get food and have shelter. The ones that struggle are the ones that want to live in popular cities precisely because of the available improvements beyond shelter and food. The houses of the 50s were shit tier and spread around the entire US. You can go buy them today for cheap in the 98% of locations people don’t want to live in.
- grisBeik 2y ago
  > So what does all the IT optimization bring? Just more wealth for the owners [...] It is time people in IT got to understand this I understand it alright, but I'm trapped. Closer to 50 than to 40, I've got a family to run. I could be interested in another profession, but our daily lives & savings would tank if I stopped working, for learning another profession. Also, there's no other profession that I could realistically learn that would let me take nearly the same amount of money home every month. If someone lives alone, they could adjust their standard of living (-> downwards, of course); how do you do that for a family? Furthermore, there is no switchover between "soulless software job for $$$" and "inspiring software job for $". There are only soulless jobs, only the $ varies. Work sucks absolutely everywhere; the only variable is compensation -- at best we can get one that "sucks less". When I was a teenager, I could have never dreamt that programming would devolve into such a cruel daily grind for me. Mid-life crisis does change how we look at things, doesn't it. We want more meaning to our work (society has extremely decoupled livelihood from meaning), but there's just no way out. Responsibilities, real or imaginary, keep us trapped. I'd love to reboot my professional life, but the risks are extreme. FWIW, I still appreciate interesting tasks at work; diving into the details lets me forget, at least for a while, how meaningless it all is.
deleted 2y ago
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cyberax 2y ago
> As an experiment, I decided to migrate two hosts (each with about 10 VMs) of a client — where I had full control—without telling them, over a weekend. Yeah. That guy should not be allowed anywhere near the production workloads. "I solve problems", my ass.
- draga79 2y ago
  I've a contract with those clients, and I can move the VMs, change the services, etc. freely as long as it doesn't cost more than the amount we've previously set. Otherwise, I'd never dare to do something like that. And I'm not so crazy as to do such an operation without the appropriate tests and foundations. Of course, when I started, I had all the conditions to be able to do it, and I had already conducted all possible tests. :-)
- codezero 2y ago
  The client is paying for the VM. The underlying system is an abstraction. As long as service agreements weren’t interrupted I don’t see the problem. It sounds shady to say “without telling them,” because saying so implies they should have. I do a lot of optimizations for my customers without telling them, it’s not usually worth mentioning. I assume what they intended to convey was that this change caused no interruption of service so there was no need to contact or warn the customer.
  - codezero 2y ago
    They also made it clear they tested it by deploying to a system not hosting clients VMs.
  - kiwijamo 2y ago
    This is similar to AWS S3 object storage -- AWS has over the years changed how they store their S3 data -- however as long as the API responds the same way every time it's all good. Personally I would probably do some A/B testing -- migrate half the workload and compare A to B to see if the new system is performing better before migrating the other half.
riiii 2y ago
[flagged]
- dang 2y ago
  Please don't do this here. Not that we don't appreciate a good old-fashioned flame, but that the long-term costs outweigh the benefits, and we want this site to survive long-term.
  - riiii 2y ago
    That was sarcasm not flame. But it's always 60/60 chance sarcasm will just blow up.
binkHN 2y ago
Glad to see all the major BSDs used here; I use OpenBSD whenever it makes sense.
- systems_glitch 2y ago
  Indeed, most of our public-facing services are hosted on OpenBSD, and all of our routers and firewalls run it. We started managing everything with Ansible to make it easier to ignore what the host OS is for a deployment, and that has worked well both in moving things to [Open,Net]BSD for experiments, and also standing up tests on various Linux distros just to make sure we're not running into a BSD vs. GNU issue, or even a "problem only on this specific distro" issue. #1 reason we chose Ansible over other tools was support for the BSDs.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  It's what I use at home and at work.
jbverschoor 2y ago
I switched from FreeBSD to Linux, mainly because of the bad Java support and the simple fact that Linux became way more popular, which added to the difference in software availability.
- jsiepkes 2y ago
  FreeBSD has pretty good Java support? Sure if there is a new LTS release it takes a couple of months before it is ported to FreeBSD but that's about it?
  - kopirgan 2y ago
    For a long time they didn't have any. I recall from mid 90s version 4+? They were still trying to port.. or was it early 2000s lol either way it's ancient history
    - jbverschoor 2y ago
      Yeah I started around 4.something until 6 I believe. After that it was all Debian. My lesson was to just use what moet people use. But then again, I always used PostgreSQL even though most were on MySQL
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        You don't have to use what "most people use" if what you're using is fully compatible, or at least compatible enough that it does everything you need it to do. PostgreSQL and MySQL are both SQL databases, so depending on what exactly you're doing, there's likely not that much difference in use. (Plus, these days, PostgreSQL seems to have become more popular.) So if you're just editing text, it doesn't matter if most people are using emacs, because you can use vim too. But I guess for running an OS, FreeBSD has had too many pain points for many people compared to just going with the Linux crowd.
        jbverschoor 2y ago
stefantalpalaru 2y ago
[dead]
rstuart4133 2y ago
All I can say is experiences differ. I'm a long time Debian user, and now use FreeBSD for work. Both are far better than the proprietary competition, but I'd take Debian/Linux over FreeBSD when building a random server. To give but one example, I recently reported a bug when FreeBSD didn't boot after upgrade from 13 to 14. Worse the disk format was somehow altered so when the reboot tried to boot off 13 due to zfs bootonce flag (supposedly a failsafe), it refused to boot for the same reason. I believe it's due to a race condition in geom/cam. The same symptoms were reported 6 years ago, but the bug report has seen no activity. Making your system irrecoverable without a rescue image and console access strikes me as pretty serious. He waxes lyrical about zfs, but it's slower and more resource hungry than it's simpler competition and it's not difficult to find numerous serious zfs bug reports over the years. (But not slower than FreeBSD's UFS, oddly. It's impressively slow.) Another thing that sticks in my mind is a core zfs contributor saying it's encryption support should never have been merged. This sounds too disparaging because the simplicity and size of FreeBSD has its own charms, but the "it's all sunshine and roses" picture he paints doesn't ring true to me. While it's probably fair to say stable versions of FreeBSD are better than the Linux kernels from kernel.org, and possibly Fedora and Ubuntu, they definitely trail behind the standard Debian stable releases. Comparing FreeBSD to Debian makes throws up some interesting tradeoffs. On the one hand, FreeBSD's init system is a delight compared to systemd. Sure, systemd can do far, far more. But that added complexity makes for a steep learning curve and a lot of weird and difficult to debug problems, and as FreeBSD's drop dead simple /etc/rc.conf system proves most of the time the complexity isn't needed to get the job done. FreeBSD's jails just make more intuitive sense to me than Linux's equivalent which is built on control groups. FreeBSD's source is a joy to read compared to most I've seen elsewhere. I don't know who's responsible for that - but they deserve a medal. On the downside - what were they thinking when they came up with the naming scheme under /dev for block devices? (Who thought withering device names was a good idea, so that /dev no longer reflects the state of attached hardware?) And a piece of free advice - just copy how Linux has does it's booting. Loading a kernel + initramfs is both simpler and far more flexible then the FreeBSD loader scheme. Hell, it's so flexible you can replace a BIOS with it. The combination of the best parts Linux and the BSD's would make for an wonderful world. But having a healthy selection of choices is probably more important, and yes - I agree with him that if you are building an appliance that has an OS embedded in it, the simplicity of FreeBSD does give it an edge.
kopirgan 2y ago
One of the website providers I use (Pair) for 20+ years used to be exclusively FreeBSD. I believe they use a lot of Linux now. Not sure why.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  I used them for shared personal website hosting until the Obama era when they were mostly/all FreeBSD. I moved off around the time AWS came about.
- pilingual 2y ago
  Ah, pair. Reminds me of this gem: http://www.archub.org/ycoutage.txt http://www.archub.org/ycoutage.txt
  - mmooss 2y ago
    Seems reasonable to me: ... This site and this directory were driving up server load averages, which causes instability for all users on this server. Our block on this site appears to have blocked over 150,000 connections in about half an hour. This is simply more than is appropriate for a shared server. You may want to review your domain's traffic logs to see what kind of traffic this site is getting. The logs for today will be distributed at midnight EST tonight. If the traffic to this site is legitimate, you should look into a dedicated or a virtual private server. If the traffic is not legitimate, you should block it. I can provide assistance with that if you need it. This domain and this directory will need to be disabled until traffic dies down, traffic is blocked, or your account is upgraded from shared hosting. If you need access to the directory so that you can make any necessary changes, please let me know.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      That's not even remotely reasonable. They should have been monitoring load and notified the customer before it got to the point that they were worried about stability. Shutting down a customer's site without warning when you could have notified them of a problem in the near future... well, that's a great way to lose a customer. I really hope YC promptly moved to another provider after that incident.
pjmlp 2y ago
Fidonet, it was been a while since I saw that.
- 8fingerlouie 2y ago
  I still remember discovering FidoNet sometime in the 90s. It was a time where sending regular mail to different countries could take weeks, and cross country phonecalls would cost between $2 and $20 per minute, and here was FidoNet that promised to allow communications across the globe with only 1-4 days delay and basically for free. My 15-18 year old self was instantly sold. I spent countless hours reading through the "forums" on there. So much knowledge just at the tip of my fingers. Of course some time later it was more or less replaced (for me) by email, usenet and IRC, but the memory still remains.
DeathArrow 2y ago
All is fine and dandy and BSDs can solve many use cases. Unfortunately for the solution we are working on, which imply many microservices we need Kubernetes and no BSD equivalent to Kubernetes exists.
- roydivision 2y ago
  Same here, otherwise I'd be considering the BSDs.
  - draga79 2y ago
    Things are improving...stay tuned :-)
- INTPenis 2y ago
  Can't you just run k8s on bsd? You might have to build and maintain your own release of it, but I'm sure someone has done it already.
  - blueflow 2y ago
    The BSD's don't have the namespaces/unshare syscall functionality like Linux does.
    - arianvanp 2y ago
      Use microvms instead of containers perhaps?
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      FreeBSD has jails, which AFAIK are fully a match in terms of functionality, but you would need to finish implementing containerd support (maybe via runj?) and then get k8s to run on top of that. I seriously doubt there's any actual technical blockers, it's just that nobody's finished implementing all the pieces and putting them together.
  - dbolgheroni 2y ago
jwildeboer 2y ago
"As an experiment, I decided to migrate two hosts (each with about 10 VMs) of a client — where I had full control—without telling them, over a weekend." And that's where I draw the line. Abusing the trust of your customers is an absolute no-no in my book.
- draga79 2y ago
  Not an abuse at all. I've a contract with those clients, and I can move the VMs, change the services, etc. freely as long as it doesn't cost more than the amount we've previously set. Otherwise, I'd never dare to do something like that.
  - blueflow 2y ago
    If it is infrastructure that is critical to your company, you do not want your hoster to run experiments on it. Its also a legal nightmare for the hoster if something goes wrong.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    It's still something that's weird to do without notifying the customers. What if things were slower? What if bsd introduced some slight change in behaviour that messed up their data but they didn't know when/why things changed? Full control doesn't mean unexpected YOLO changes are welcome.
    - draga79 2y ago
      As specified in several parts, the tests were conducted while maintaining and using BSD-based infrastructures for over 20 years. In some cases, Linux was used for various reasons (commercial, ideological, because they were inherited infrastructures managed by others, etc.), but the results were anticipated. I did not expect a performance degradation, and in any case, having set up the systems in a mirrored environment, there was always the possibility to revert in a few minutes.
      - viraptor 2y ago

334 points by msangi 2y ago

I use Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all for fun, learning, and profit(the first two). At the very least it is nice to make acquaintance with at least one BSD because it will probably expand your knowledge on Linux in ways you wont be able to anticipate. For example, FreeBSD got me into kernel development, full system debugging, network stack development, driver development, and understanding how the whole kit fits together. Those skills transferred back and forth with reasonable fidelity to Linux, and for me jumping into Linux development cold would have been too big a leap.. especially in confidence and developing a mental model. For my personal infrastructure, I tend to use FreeBSD because in many ways it is simpler and less surprising, especially when accounting for the passage of time. ifconfig is still ifconfig, and it works great. rc.d is all I need for my own stuff. I like the systematic effects of things like tunables and sysctl for managing hardware and kernel configuration. The man pages are forever useful to new and old users. The kernel APIs and userland APIs are extremely stable akin to commercial operating systems and unlike Linux. There are warts. There are community frictions. The desktop story and some developer experiences will be perpetually behind Linux due to the size of the contributor base and user base. The job market for BSD is very limited compared to Linux. But I don't think it's an all or nothing affair, and ideally in a high stakes operation you would dual stack for availability and zero-day mitigation (Verisign once gave a great talk on this).

cientifico 2y ago
I completely agree! If you're looking to deeply understand how Linux works under the hood, I highly recommend trying out Linux From Scratch. It gave me invaluable insight into the system, especially when I first explored it 20 years ago. Building everything from the ground up—without relying on prepackaged distros or libc—was a game changer. Check it out: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
- hggigg 2y ago
  I ran through that about 10 years ago. Not difficult for a reasonably seasoned Unixy person to run through but it quite frankly scared the shit out of me on the basis of how much stuff requires patching and hacking. Nothing fits together nicely. It gave me a whole new appreciation of macOS and FreeBSD.
ab71e5 2y ago
What sort of projects did you do to get into network stack and driver development on BSD?
- tcmart14 2y ago
  Just commenting to express my interest also in the answer to this question.
- kev009 2y ago
  I worked at a large service provider and had to fix bugs and improve performance in TCP/IP and Intel Ethernet drivers. I ended up really enjoying it so it became a hobby and consulting gig as well.
  - ab71e5 2y ago
    Awesome, you are kind of describing my dream job. Any particular hobby projects you are willing to share? I'm working on something myself trying to use eBPF/XDP offloading for a particular protocol
    - kev009 2y ago
      Lately I have been enjoying NetBSD on a EdgeRouter-4 (Octeon MIPS). I am trying to port some of the OpenBSD Octeon improvements like the MMC driver and maybe SMP support. On FreeBSD I have been pushing some changes to the 1, 2.5, and 10gbit Intel drivers that will decrease driver overhead a few percent.
graemep 2y ago
> tend to use FreeBSD because in many ways it is simpler and less surprising, especially when accounting for the passage of time. ifconfig is still ifconfig, and it works great. rc.d is all I need for my own stuff. That sounds very appealing to me. I have to keep a small number of servers running, but its not my main focus and I would like to spend as little time on it as possible. I have started using Alpine Linux for servers (not for my desktop, yet) because it is light and simple. Maybe BSD will be the next step.
- nucleardog 2y ago
  The UI generally quite stable and well documented, which is awesome. They also have things like `rpm` in ports that you can install. Why? Because you can enable linux binary compatibility[0] and run linux binaries on it (this implements the linux kernel interface, it's not a VM/emulator). It's also backward compatible with its own binaries back to FreeBSD 4 (circa 2000). Though you may not need that as the ports/packages collection is pretty comprehensive. It also comes with some nifty tools built-in for isolation (similar to but predating cgroups/containers) as "jails". It also has a hypervisor built in (bhyve) for virtualization if you do need to run any linux VMs or anything for any reason. The way I usually sum up the difference to people is that FreeBSD is designed while Linux is grown. FreeBSD feels much more like a cohesive whole than Linux. Really, the only reason I'm not running it everywhere is that the industry has kind of settled on linux-style containers for... absolutely everything, and the current solution for that on FreeBSD is basically "run linux in a VM". [0] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/linuxemu/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/linuxemu/
  - ornornor 2y ago
    > Really, the only reason I'm not running it everywhere is that the industry has kind of settled on linux-style containers for... absolutely everything, and the current solution for that on FreeBSD is basically "run linux in a VM". That, and the wifi situation on laptops.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
sitkack 2y ago
I really really enjoyed using FreeBSD. It isn't a distro but a full OS that you can and easily fully rebuild from source. The people are great, the tech is good. The CON is coming up, https://freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/event-calendar/fall-2024-freebsd-summit/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/event-calendar... Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit November 7-8, 2024 San Jose, CA
torstenvl 2y ago
Yeah, you know, a lot of us talk about FreeBSD being great because you aren't surprised by design choices—it mostly just makes sense. But I don't think we talk enough about the joy of not being surprised by updates. I'm about to do an upgrade from 13.2 to 14.1 this weekend and I am very confident that I won't have to worry about configuring a new audio subsystem, changing all my startup scripts to work with a new service manager paradigm, or half my programs suddenly being slow because they're some new quasi-container package format.
knowitnone 2y ago
I see the reason for dual stack but I would rather focus my efforts into securing one OS. If you buy into that, why not 3 or 4 different OSes?
- hansvm 2y ago
  3-4 would be great. What would you pick for the rest in this day and age though?
  - gspencley 2y ago
    I'm still waiting for BeOS to make a come back
    - timeon 2y ago
      What is the situation with Haiku now?
      - senorsmile 2y ago
        They just released another "beta" not long ago. It seems like it's getting closer and closer to being daily driver ready.
- eklavya 2y ago
  Because tradeoffs and diminishing returns are a thing? For example having one backup is better than having no backups. Backups spread across earth, moon and mars would be better but probaboy not worth the cost.
- kev009 2y ago
  It's an engineering tradeoff and market adaptation. If you are a typical SaaS provider the complexity may be beyond your capabilities and budgets.. allegory to a local delivery business choosing to build a long term relationship with a single vehicle manufacturer and dealer. If you are a high stakes service provider, you need to start thinking about how to get out from being controlled by a single vendor and market flux and plot your own destiny.. allegory to a national shipping carrier sourcing vehicles from multiple manufacturers and developing long term relationships with them to refine the platform.
MuffinFlavored 2y ago
> it will probably expand your knowledge It really just fragments my knowledge to be honest. Say "I gotta get things done". Get me to a terminal. You've got Mac OS command line flags, GNU, BSD. Great. Then it's some kind of asinine config to interact with some piece of software, all to achieve "generally the same thing", just a different way/flavor. I really don't see the benefits.
- cientifico 2y ago
  It’s like driving a car. Most people can drive without needing to understand the internals, and it’ll still get them from point A to B. But just like some people enjoy diving deep into car mechanics, others enjoy understanding the intricacies of software. For me, that deeper knowledge is an advantage. It helps me quickly evaluate tradeoffs between databases, debug at the OS level, or dismiss a library still relying on select if I expect heavy load. This insight saves time and increases efficiency.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    And in the car analogy, it's other a diesel engine vs gasoline. The fundamentals are the same but there are some core differences, and it's just nice to know more stuff about everything.
  - kev009 2y ago
    Yes, and if you are a powertrain engineer (allegory for system developer) you'd benefit from knowing a variety of technologies in the automotive industry to be able to adapt to market conditions. If you are a heavy equipment mechanic (allegory for operator), knowing Cummins, Cat, and Detroit engines would be expected. For some reason computing professionals tend to be a lot more tribal and gravitate toward monoculture.
  - MuffinFlavored 2y ago
    I politely disagree. I love the driving a car analogy. You've got 2 kinds of cars overall really. Automatic transmission or manual. Get into any of them and everything is the same. Gas pedal, brake pedal, etc. Objective what you need to get done? Drive from A to B. It is impossible to drive from A to B with FreeBSD if all you know is Linux commands/syntaxes. That's my whole argument. That it isn't as mild of a jump as driving car A or car B. You are blocked (and need to throw out what you know on Linux for BSD because it'll collide). Are the differences mild? Sure, but enough to make you ineffective.
v1ne 2y ago
I also still use FreeBSD on my NAS. But after many years, the desktop experience was pretty sad and made me switch to Windows + Linux for my hardware tinkering. On one side, the lack of manpower shows in many places, unfortunately. I'm talking modern WiFi, GPU support, or power-save mechanisms. On the other side, many Open Source projects only support Linux and getting their projects to compile + run on FreeBSD was a pain, too. I mean, in addition to what kev009 mentioned, FreeBSD has so many great things to offer: For example, a full-featured "ifconfig" instead of ip + ethtool + iwconfig. Or consistent file-system snapshots since like forever on UFS (and ZFS, of course). I never understood how people in a commercial setup could run filesystem-level backups on a machine without that, like on Linux with ext4. It's just asking for trouble. So, I'm happy to see this thread about FreeBSD here! Maybe we can make the Open Source scene a bit more diverse again with regards to operating systems…

linuxandrew 2y ago

I've recently discovered systemd-nspawn which is an alternative to LXC, builtin and integrated into systemd. Much lighter than full VMs and it's quite similar to Solaris Zones and FreeBSD jails. One way to use it is to extract an OCI (Docker) image to a path, that way you can reuse the container tooling provided by Docker, Podman et al. I've barely touched the BSDs and it's been a few years since I last used Solaris so I can't make much of a comparison as a user myself.

rtp4me 2y ago
Thanks for this! I have been using LXC/LXD for a long time and never knew about systemd-nspawn. Time to go learn something new!

sylware 2y ago

I really wanted to give a try to FreeBSD... because I thought it was linux from "better" times... and then I saw they are tied to the tons of similar gcc extensions... and then I say to myself "why bother since it has the same major compiler dependency issue", better try to fix linux code base or start from there.

ComputerGuru 2y ago
It doesn’t, though? Gcc doesn’t even ship oob, the project itself uses clang, and almost all packages are also compiled with the system c/c++ toolchain.
- sylware 2y ago
  llvm is not less worse than gcc... come on...

viraptor 2y ago

I like the idea and would like to learn more, but it looks like "migrated stuff without testing ahead of time and it turned out faster for some reason". Was it the memory allocations? Was it the disk latency? The hypervisor? Could it be replicated by other means? It was a fun read, but the reasoning/understanding was missing. I hope people investigate deeper before making changes like that. If you look for benchmarks comparing databases on Linux/BSDs you'll find lots of nuance in practice and results going both ways depending on configuration and what's being tested.

draga79 2y ago
No, after 20 years of use and comparative testing of similar setups. Frankly, I have always placed little importance on benchmarks as I consider them extremely specific. I am interested in real-world use cases. The goal of the talk and the article is not to urge people to migrate all their setups, but simply to share my experience and the results achieved. To encourage the use of BSDs for their own purposes as well. It’s not to say that they are the best solution; there is no universal solution to all problems, but having a range of choices can only be positive.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

erros 2y ago

Ladies and gentlemen, this person solves problems. Let it be known.

knowitnone 2y ago
he gave himself a pat on the back

thoroughburro 2y ago

> The largest failure was with btrfs — after a reboot, a 50 TB filesystem (in mirror, for backups) simply stopped working. No more mounting possible. Data was lost, but I had further backups. The client was informed and understood the situation. Within a few days, the server was rebuilt from scratch on FreeBSD with ZFS — since then, I haven’t lost a single bit. As someone who admins a lot of btrfs, it seems very unlikely that this was unrecoverable. btrfs gets itself into scary situations, but also gets itself out again with a little effort. In this instance “I solve problems” meant “I blow away the problem and start fresh”. Always easier! Glad the client was so understanding.

lproven 2y ago
> As someone who admins a lot of btrfs, it seems very unlikely that this was unrecoverable. As someone who used it all day every day in my day job for 4 years, I find it 100% believable. I am not saying you're wrong: I'm saying, experiences differ widely, and your patterns of use are not be universal. It's the single most unreliable untrustworthy filesystem I've used in the 21st century.
- gosub100 2y ago
  The first time I tried it out about 4 years old, I bricked it within a few days!! It was on a new (to me) Linux distro or maybe an existing one but I heard it was cool and the snapshots sounded neat. I stayed away for a while but have it again on a Garuda install. I never completely give up on a technology, I hope they get it together.
- AnonC 2y ago
  > It's the single most unreliable untrustworthy filesystem I've used in the 21st century. I think the “experiences differ widely” point makes sense with this comment too. Synology uses btrfs on the NAS systems it sells (there’s probably some option to choose another filesystem, but this is the default, AFAIK). If it were to be “the most unreliable untrustworthy filesystem” for many others too, Synology would’ve (or should’ve) chosen something else.

wombatpm 2y ago

rbc 2y ago

I've become a fairly loyal OpenBSD user in the last 3-4 years. The base OpenBSD load includes a substantial amount of network capabilities, and is cleanly implemented. It's almost too cleanly implemented, to the point of making me feel sort of guilty when I start to clutter up an install with a bunch of packages... If my needs for storage were more complicated, I would probably use FreeBSD ZFS, but UFS suffices for my rather modest needs. I use OpenBSD for desktop, web and mail services. There are some limitations, but none that are serious enough to warrant dealing with running another BSD, or Linux distribution.

nottorp 2y ago

If I want to run a BSD as just a file server - so I guess zfs + samba + bonjour or whatever the discovery protocol is these days - which BSD should I try?

nanolith 2y ago
I'd recommend using FreeBSD as your first BSD. It has a more recent version of ZFS integrated in the kernel than NetBSD. OpenBSD does not have ZFS support; it's a direction they chose not to take for security and simplicity reasons.
whalesalad 2y ago
TrueNAS

theamk 2y ago

> [users ..] began explicitly requesting “jails” instead of Docker hosts. They started using BastilleBSD to clone “template” jails and deploy them. huh, were they running persistent docker containers and modifying them in-place? If that's the case, they were missing the best part of Docker - the Dockerfile and "container is a cattle". The power of Docker is there no ad-hoc system customization possible, it's all in Dockerfile which is source-controlled and versioned, and artifacts (like built images) are read-only. To go from this to all-manual "use bastille edit TARGET fstab to manually update the jail mounts from 13.1 to 13.2 release path." [0] seems like a real step back. I can understand why one might want to go to BSD if they prefer this kind of workflow, but for all my projects, I am now convinced that functional-like approach (or at least IaaC-like one) is much more powerful than manually editing individual files on live hosts. [0] https://bastille.readthedocs.io/en/latest/chapters/upgrading.html#revert-upgrade-downgrade-process https://bastille.readthedocs.io/en/latest/chapters/upgrading...

tracker1 2y ago

I would differ on a small point. For SOHO usage, I think that docker compose is perfectly viable and often simplifies backup, migration and moving to a new server. Just my own take on this. A lot of apps really only need one instance with a good backup strategy and not hot failover instances and can handle an hour of down time once a year or two as needed, which I rarely experience. As mentioned in the article, it also serves as a decent set of instructions, assuming the actual dockerfile(s) for the services and dependencies are broadly available. You can swap out the compose instance of PostgreSQL for your dedicated server with a new account/db, relatively easily. Similar for other non-app centered services (redis, rabbitmq, etc). You can go all in, or partly in and in any case it does serve as self-documenting to a large degree.

knowitnone 2y ago

Running 3 different BSDs is not my idea of solving problems.

KronisLV 2y ago
They might be really good for specific tasks, but someone else will also need to maintain the setups, which will make things harder when most of the folks in the job market have experience with the various Linux distros, but finding BSD experience might be a tad more difficult. I am personally on board with using the various BSDs when it makes sense (though maybe just pick FreeBSD and stick with it, as opposed to fragmenting the install base, the same way how I've settled on Ubuntu LTS wherever possible; it's not ideal but it works), except the thing is that most job ads and such call for Linux experience in particular, same with tooling like Kubernetes and OCI/Docker containers and such. Ergo, that's where most of my time goes, I want to remain employable and also produce solutions that will be understandable to most people, instead of getting my DMs pinged whenever someone is confused by what they're seeing.

sangnoir 2y ago

I love it when the answer to a question posed in a headline is provided in the second sentence of the article. > I’m the founder and Barista of the BSD Cafe, a community of *BSD enthusiasts Did the original article change it's title (currently "I Solve Problems"), or did the submitter editorialize it?

bzmrgonz 2y ago

Awesome writeup, thanks for that, it really puts the bsd's in perspective of today's tech industry. What's the BSD version of k8s? You mention BSDs instead of k8s in the article.

nikisweeting 2y ago

I'm surprised no one is talking about FreeNAS / TrueNAS and their interesting history in this area in the comments. There's probably more collective writing about the various tradeoffs between Debian and FreeBSD in their forums and communities than anywhere else on the internet. Personally I love ZFS and ZFS on root so much I can never go back to not having it. It's a shame more cloud providers like DigitalOcean/AWS/etc. don't offer it natively.

phendrenad2 2y ago

Is BSD really significantly more efficient than Linux? The anecdotes here seem almost unbelievable.

ksec 2y ago

I dont think the article is even about BSDs, but generally really bad things in the tech sectors and philosophy to tech. >my priority is solving my clients’ specific problems, not selling a predefined solution. >It’s better to pay for everything to work than to pay to fix problems. >computing should solve problems and provide opportunities to those who use it. >The trend is to rush, to simplify deployments as much as possible, sweeping structural problems under the rug. The goal is to “innovate”, not necessarily improve — just as long as it’s “new” or “how everyone does it, nowadays.” >Some people are used to thinking that the ideal solution is X — and believe that X is the only solution for their problems. Often, X is the hype of the moment >When I ask, “Okay, but why? Who will manage it? Where will your data really be, and who will safeguard it?”, I get blank faces. They hadn’t considered these questions. No one had even mentioned them. >We’ve lost control of the data. For many, it’s unnecessary to complicate things. And with every additional layer, we’re creating more problems. Hopefully someday more people will wake up.

iluvcommunism 2y ago

FreeBSD is great as a server. Wifi performance still sucks. The author praised byhve but byhve is not all it’s cracked up to be. Both Xen and Linux virtualization perform better, VMware as well. I like FreeBSD, but the other day I found it still uses sendmail. Rc.conf is simple to use, and the ports system is great…I just feel the author was pushing his “X” solution. Hardware support is important as well. I’ve used BSD for a SAN, and FW. Would I use it for a virtualization host? No.

froh 2y ago

the title of the talk is "Why (and how) we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs" and that should be the title of this post too. I like that the blog post shares the slides, not just the video.

dang 2y ago
Ok, done. Thanks!

Borg3 2y ago

I wish he could write up a bit about XFS failure he had. Im using it from many many years and there is no issues at all.

Tor3 2y ago
I'm interested too. I'm using XFS only, and have for many years. On my own boxes, but my company also uses XFS for all the data on customer computers. We did extensive testing many years back, and XFS was the only filesystem at the time which gave a linear, constantly very high performance when writing and reading huge amounts of data (real-time data, dips in performance is a 100% no-no), and also not degrading when having huge numbers of files. We've never had a customer lose data due to XFS problems, and at this point I can't imagine how much data that would be, except that it's astronomical. When that's said, we had routine XFS losses on SGI boxes. That was a very well known scenario: Write constantly to a one-page text file, say, every few seconds, then power cycle the machine. The file would be empty afterwards. This doesn't happen on Linux, I vaguely recall discussing this with someone some years ago (maybe here on HN) and something was changed at some point, maybe when SGI migrated XFS to Linux, or shortly after.
blipvert 2y ago
Used it since the late 90s on IRIX, think there were a few issues early on with the endian swap, but no issues for the best part of twenty years for me!
hggigg 2y ago
I had one a few years back where we ran out of inodes on a Jenkins machine on CentOS 7 and it crashed and couldn’t remount the filesystem. I had to restore a backup which was time consuming on a 4TB volume with crazy amounts of files.
lotharcable 2y ago
It hard to know the timeline with his data loss, but I am assuming it was a long time ago. XFS is originally from SGI Irix and was designed to run on higher end hardware. SGI donated it to Linux in 1999 and it carried a lot of its assumptions over. For example on SGI boxes you had "hardware raid" with cache, which essentially is a sort of embedded computer with it's own memory. That cache had a battery backup so that if the machine had a crash or sudden power loss the hardware raid would live on long enough to finish its writes. SGI had tight control over the type of hardware you could use and it was usually good quality stuff. In the land of commodity PC-based servers this isn't often how it worked. Instead you just had regular IDE or SATA hard drives. And those drives lied. On cheap hardware the firmware would report back it had finished writes when in fact it didn't because it made it seem faster in benchmarks. And consumers/enterprise types looking to save money with Linux mostly bought whatever is the cheapest and fastest looking on benchmarks. So that if there was a hardware failure or sudden power loss there would could be several megs of writes that were still in flight when the file system thought they were safely written to disk. That meant there was a distinct chance of dataloss when it came to using Linux and XFS early on. I experienced problems like that in early 2000s era Linux XFS. This was always a big benefit to sticking with Ext4. It is kinda dumb luck that Ext4 is as fast as it is when it came to hosting databases, but the real reason to use it is because it had a lot of robust recovery tools. It was designed from the ground up with the assumption that you were using the cheapest crappiest hardware you can buy (Personal PCs). However modern XFS is a completely different beast. It has been rewritten extensively and improved massively over what was originally ported over from SGI. It is different enough that a guy's experience with it from 2005 or 2010 isn't really meaningful. I have zero real technical knowledge on file systems except as a end-user, but from what I understand FreeBSD uses UFS that uses a "WAL" or "write ahead log".. where it records writes it is going to do before it does it. I think this is a simpler but more robust solution then the sort of journalling that XFS or Ext4 uses. The trade off is lower performance. As far as ZFS vs Btrfs... I really like to avoid Btrfs as much as possible. A number of distros use it by default (OpenSUSE, Fedora, etc), but I just format everything as a single partition as Ext4 or XFS on personal stuff. I use it on my personal file server, but it really simple setup with UPS. I don't use ZFS, but I strongly suspect that btrfs simply failed to rise to its level. One of the reasons Linux persists despite not having something up to the level of ZFS is that most of ZFS features are redundant to larger enterprise customers. They typically use expensive SAN or more advanced NAS that has proprietary storage solutions that provide ZFS-like features long before ZFS was a thing. So throwing something as complicated as ZFS on top of that really provides no benefit. Or they use one of Linux clustered file system solutions, of which there is a wide selection.

vfclists 2y ago

> “If nothing is working, what am I paying you for? If everything’s working, what am I paying you for?” Bloke is not acquainted with Keynesian economics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OhIdDNtSv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OhIdDNtSv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO_tTnpof_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO_tTnpof_o All a man needs is food in his stomach and a place to rest at the end of the day. Everything else is vanity What proportion of global GDP is dedicated to fulfilling our basic material needs? It is mostly unnecessary. Inspite of the huge productivity gains made since the seventies, the current generation of young Americans are poorer than their parents and grandparents were at their age. So what does all the IT optimization bring? Just more wealth for the owners and redundancies for their employees, including Joe Bloggs here. It is time people in IT got to understand this. In the long term their activities are not going to improve their wealth. They are one of the few professions whose job is to optimize themselves out of a living, unless they own the means of the production their are optimizing, which they don't. It is their employers that do.

consp 2y ago
The problem with the IT crowd is they think they are ahead of the optimization curve, and since everyone does, nobody is.
kortilla 2y ago
The current generation of Americans are absolutely rich enough to just get food and have shelter. The ones that struggle are the ones that want to live in popular cities precisely because of the available improvements beyond shelter and food. The houses of the 50s were shit tier and spread around the entire US. You can go buy them today for cheap in the 98% of locations people don’t want to live in.
grisBeik 2y ago
> So what does all the IT optimization bring? Just more wealth for the owners [...] It is time people in IT got to understand this I understand it alright, but I'm trapped. Closer to 50 than to 40, I've got a family to run. I could be interested in another profession, but our daily lives & savings would tank if I stopped working, for learning another profession. Also, there's no other profession that I could realistically learn that would let me take nearly the same amount of money home every month. If someone lives alone, they could adjust their standard of living (-> downwards, of course); how do you do that for a family? Furthermore, there is no switchover between "soulless software job for $$$" and "inspiring software job for $". There are only soulless jobs, only the $ varies. Work sucks absolutely everywhere; the only variable is compensation -- at best we can get one that "sucks less". When I was a teenager, I could have never dreamt that programming would devolve into such a cruel daily grind for me. Mid-life crisis does change how we look at things, doesn't it. We want more meaning to our work (society has extremely decoupled livelihood from meaning), but there's just no way out. Responsibilities, real or imaginary, keep us trapped. I'd love to reboot my professional life, but the risks are extreme. FWIW, I still appreciate interesting tasks at work; diving into the details lets me forget, at least for a while, how meaningless it all is.

deleted 2y ago

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cyberax 2y ago

> As an experiment, I decided to migrate two hosts (each with about 10 VMs) of a client — where I had full control—without telling them, over a weekend. Yeah. That guy should not be allowed anywhere near the production workloads. "I solve problems", my ass.

draga79 2y ago
I've a contract with those clients, and I can move the VMs, change the services, etc. freely as long as it doesn't cost more than the amount we've previously set. Otherwise, I'd never dare to do something like that. And I'm not so crazy as to do such an operation without the appropriate tests and foundations. Of course, when I started, I had all the conditions to be able to do it, and I had already conducted all possible tests. :-)
codezero 2y ago
The client is paying for the VM. The underlying system is an abstraction. As long as service agreements weren’t interrupted I don’t see the problem. It sounds shady to say “without telling them,” because saying so implies they should have. I do a lot of optimizations for my customers without telling them, it’s not usually worth mentioning. I assume what they intended to convey was that this change caused no interruption of service so there was no need to contact or warn the customer.
- codezero 2y ago
  They also made it clear they tested it by deploying to a system not hosting clients VMs.
- kiwijamo 2y ago
  This is similar to AWS S3 object storage -- AWS has over the years changed how they store their S3 data -- however as long as the API responds the same way every time it's all good. Personally I would probably do some A/B testing -- migrate half the workload and compare A to B to see if the new system is performing better before migrating the other half.

riiii 2y ago

[flagged]

dang 2y ago
Please don't do this here. Not that we don't appreciate a good old-fashioned flame, but that the long-term costs outweigh the benefits, and we want this site to survive long-term.
- riiii 2y ago
  That was sarcasm not flame. But it's always 60/60 chance sarcasm will just blow up.

binkHN 2y ago

Glad to see all the major BSDs used here; I use OpenBSD whenever it makes sense.

systems_glitch 2y ago
Indeed, most of our public-facing services are hosted on OpenBSD, and all of our routers and firewalls run it. We started managing everything with Ansible to make it easier to ignore what the host OS is for a deployment, and that has worked well both in moving things to [Open,Net]BSD for experiments, and also standing up tests on various Linux distros just to make sure we're not running into a BSD vs. GNU issue, or even a "problem only on this specific distro" issue. #1 reason we chose Ansible over other tools was support for the BSDs.
SoftTalker 2y ago
It's what I use at home and at work.

jbverschoor 2y ago

I switched from FreeBSD to Linux, mainly because of the bad Java support and the simple fact that Linux became way more popular, which added to the difference in software availability.

jsiepkes 2y ago
FreeBSD has pretty good Java support? Sure if there is a new LTS release it takes a couple of months before it is ported to FreeBSD but that's about it?
- kopirgan 2y ago
  For a long time they didn't have any. I recall from mid 90s version 4+? They were still trying to port.. or was it early 2000s lol either way it's ancient history
  - jbverschoor 2y ago
    Yeah I started around 4.something until 6 I believe. After that it was all Debian. My lesson was to just use what moet people use. But then again, I always used PostgreSQL even though most were on MySQL
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      You don't have to use what "most people use" if what you're using is fully compatible, or at least compatible enough that it does everything you need it to do. PostgreSQL and MySQL are both SQL databases, so depending on what exactly you're doing, there's likely not that much difference in use. (Plus, these days, PostgreSQL seems to have become more popular.) So if you're just editing text, it doesn't matter if most people are using emacs, because you can use vim too. But I guess for running an OS, FreeBSD has had too many pain points for many people compared to just going with the Linux crowd.
      - jbverschoor 2y ago

stefantalpalaru 2y ago

[dead]

rstuart4133 2y ago

All I can say is experiences differ. I'm a long time Debian user, and now use FreeBSD for work. Both are far better than the proprietary competition, but I'd take Debian/Linux over FreeBSD when building a random server. To give but one example, I recently reported a bug when FreeBSD didn't boot after upgrade from 13 to 14. Worse the disk format was somehow altered so when the reboot tried to boot off 13 due to zfs bootonce flag (supposedly a failsafe), it refused to boot for the same reason. I believe it's due to a race condition in geom/cam. The same symptoms were reported 6 years ago, but the bug report has seen no activity. Making your system irrecoverable without a rescue image and console access strikes me as pretty serious. He waxes lyrical about zfs, but it's slower and more resource hungry than it's simpler competition and it's not difficult to find numerous serious zfs bug reports over the years. (But not slower than FreeBSD's UFS, oddly. It's impressively slow.) Another thing that sticks in my mind is a core zfs contributor saying it's encryption support should never have been merged. This sounds too disparaging because the simplicity and size of FreeBSD has its own charms, but the "it's all sunshine and roses" picture he paints doesn't ring true to me. While it's probably fair to say stable versions of FreeBSD are better than the Linux kernels from kernel.org, and possibly Fedora and Ubuntu, they definitely trail behind the standard Debian stable releases. Comparing FreeBSD to Debian makes throws up some interesting tradeoffs. On the one hand, FreeBSD's init system is a delight compared to systemd. Sure, systemd can do far, far more. But that added complexity makes for a steep learning curve and a lot of weird and difficult to debug problems, and as FreeBSD's drop dead simple /etc/rc.conf system proves most of the time the complexity isn't needed to get the job done. FreeBSD's jails just make more intuitive sense to me than Linux's equivalent which is built on control groups. FreeBSD's source is a joy to read compared to most I've seen elsewhere. I don't know who's responsible for that - but they deserve a medal. On the downside - what were they thinking when they came up with the naming scheme under /dev for block devices? (Who thought withering device names was a good idea, so that /dev no longer reflects the state of attached hardware?) And a piece of free advice - just copy how Linux has does it's booting. Loading a kernel + initramfs is both simpler and far more flexible then the FreeBSD loader scheme. Hell, it's so flexible you can replace a BIOS with it. The combination of the best parts Linux and the BSD's would make for an wonderful world. But having a healthy selection of choices is probably more important, and yes - I agree with him that if you are building an appliance that has an OS embedded in it, the simplicity of FreeBSD does give it an edge.

kopirgan 2y ago

One of the website providers I use (Pair) for 20+ years used to be exclusively FreeBSD. I believe they use a lot of Linux now. Not sure why.

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
I used them for shared personal website hosting until the Obama era when they were mostly/all FreeBSD. I moved off around the time AWS came about.
pilingual 2y ago
Ah, pair. Reminds me of this gem: http://www.archub.org/ycoutage.txt http://www.archub.org/ycoutage.txt
- mmooss 2y ago
  Seems reasonable to me: ... This site and this directory were driving up server load averages, which causes instability for all users on this server. Our block on this site appears to have blocked over 150,000 connections in about half an hour. This is simply more than is appropriate for a shared server. You may want to review your domain's traffic logs to see what kind of traffic this site is getting. The logs for today will be distributed at midnight EST tonight. If the traffic to this site is legitimate, you should look into a dedicated or a virtual private server. If the traffic is not legitimate, you should block it. I can provide assistance with that if you need it. This domain and this directory will need to be disabled until traffic dies down, traffic is blocked, or your account is upgraded from shared hosting. If you need access to the directory so that you can make any necessary changes, please let me know.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    That's not even remotely reasonable. They should have been monitoring load and notified the customer before it got to the point that they were worried about stability. Shutting down a customer's site without warning when you could have notified them of a problem in the near future... well, that's a great way to lose a customer. I really hope YC promptly moved to another provider after that incident.

pjmlp 2y ago

Fidonet, it was been a while since I saw that.

8fingerlouie 2y ago
I still remember discovering FidoNet sometime in the 90s. It was a time where sending regular mail to different countries could take weeks, and cross country phonecalls would cost between $2 and $20 per minute, and here was FidoNet that promised to allow communications across the globe with only 1-4 days delay and basically for free. My 15-18 year old self was instantly sold. I spent countless hours reading through the "forums" on there. So much knowledge just at the tip of my fingers. Of course some time later it was more or less replaced (for me) by email, usenet and IRC, but the memory still remains.

DeathArrow 2y ago

All is fine and dandy and BSDs can solve many use cases. Unfortunately for the solution we are working on, which imply many microservices we need Kubernetes and no BSD equivalent to Kubernetes exists.

roydivision 2y ago
Same here, otherwise I'd be considering the BSDs.
- draga79 2y ago
  Things are improving...stay tuned :-)
INTPenis 2y ago
Can't you just run k8s on bsd? You might have to build and maintain your own release of it, but I'm sure someone has done it already.
- blueflow 2y ago
  The BSD's don't have the namespaces/unshare syscall functionality like Linux does.
  - arianvanp 2y ago
    Use microvms instead of containers perhaps?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    FreeBSD has jails, which AFAIK are fully a match in terms of functionality, but you would need to finish implementing containerd support (maybe via runj?) and then get k8s to run on top of that. I seriously doubt there's any actual technical blockers, it's just that nobody's finished implementing all the pieces and putting them together.
- dbolgheroni 2y ago

jwildeboer 2y ago

"As an experiment, I decided to migrate two hosts (each with about 10 VMs) of a client — where I had full control—without telling them, over a weekend." And that's where I draw the line. Abusing the trust of your customers is an absolute no-no in my book.

draga79 2y ago
Not an abuse at all. I've a contract with those clients, and I can move the VMs, change the services, etc. freely as long as it doesn't cost more than the amount we've previously set. Otherwise, I'd never dare to do something like that.
- blueflow 2y ago
  If it is infrastructure that is critical to your company, you do not want your hoster to run experiments on it. Its also a legal nightmare for the hoster if something goes wrong.
- viraptor 2y ago
  It's still something that's weird to do without notifying the customers. What if things were slower? What if bsd introduced some slight change in behaviour that messed up their data but they didn't know when/why things changed? Full control doesn't mean unexpected YOLO changes are welcome.
  - draga79 2y ago
    As specified in several parts, the tests were conducted while maintaining and using BSD-based infrastructures for over 20 years. In some cases, Linux was used for various reasons (commercial, ideological, because they were inherited infrastructures managed by others, etc.), but the results were anticipated. I did not expect a performance degradation, and in any case, having set up the systems in a mirrored environment, there was always the possibility to revert in a few minutes.
    - viraptor 2y ago