6 ms·

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

87 points by dazzawazza 2y ago

JohnFen 2y ago
I'm halfway through switching all of my personal machines from Linux to BSD for pretty much this exact reason. It's going very well so far.
- bionsystem 2y ago
  I wish I could do that but I can't recall any employer that would have allowed that. One of my employer was around 90% Solaris though (10 and 11) over 5000+ hostnames (VMs, zones and physical) and it required very little maintenance, a team of 3 seasoned ops was enough to do everything up to L2/L3.
- amelius 2y ago
  I'm stuck with Linux on an nVidia Jetson that is locked by the manufacturer to Ubuntu :(
  - guelermus 2y ago
    There is a Yocto solutin in Github. But I don't know how good it is about NVIDIA AI libraries. https://github.com/OE4T/meta-tegra https://github.com/OE4T/meta-tegra
jl6 2y ago
I feel that “it just works and you don’t need to maintain it” is less an OS feature, and more about what you are doing with it.
- jimnotgym 2y ago
  I agree. I have had several services run for a decade on a company LAN using Linux. They did boring things well. They will still work in 20 years if the hardware is still there.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    To be fair I've had Debian boxes with uptimes of many years and service lives of a decade. A sarge install doing nothing but DNS (on metal not VM) from 2006 lasted until 2015. So it isn't just a Linux - BSD thing it's a mindset of simplicity and focus of function. But since about 2020 my love for Debian waned, what with the systemd and ugly internal politics. Nowadays I'm inclined to look at whether a BSD or other operating system [0] might be a good fit for someones needs. Basically I find the most mature mindset exists wherever it's furthest away from the GAFAM/Bigtech values which corrupt, over-complicate everything and try to suck you into ongoing unstable dependency relation. Using "unfashionable" technology is pretty much always a win in my experience. [0] https://www.techradar.com/news/best-alternative-operating-systems https://www.techradar.com/news/best-alternative-operating-sy...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - AStonesThrow 2y ago
      It's interesting, because around 2004-06 was when I struggled mightily with hardware issues, especially audio, and Chris Siebenmann was the one who urged me to "install Ubuntu and be done with it." And Ubuntu really was the value-add, turnkey solution for someone who needed a desktop system as "daily driver" without endless tinkering and custom fixes. But by 2018, Ubuntu was making enough proprietary additions that I didn't need, and I began to notice Debian's maturity and feature parity. But Debian still had a reputation for being extremely stable. So some new installs were Debian, and in 2018 when I purchased a Lenovo notebook, some were Ubuntu-certified, and I chose Red Hat certified, which ultimately ran Fedora quite smoothly. (There were no BSD-certified notebooks.)
- steeleduncan 2y ago
  Yes, the most concrete issue the article mentions is losing data on Btrfs, but that is well known to be a flaky, semi-experimental file system, the operating system has very little to do with it. The equivalent would be running Debian on ext4 Also, the article mentions Kubernetes a few times, which quite fairly has a reputation for massive complexity, but is again entirely optional, and a piece of software entirely separate from the operating system. I agree with the basic point of achieving reliability by using the simplest technology available, but the focus on the operating system for me is misguided here, and at best a temporary fix. If BSD were to catch on for that reason, Kubernetes would be ported to BSD, and the same problem would arise there
  - nxicvyvy 2y ago
    It's also a 10 years out of date complaint. Btrfs has been stable for fucking ages. That meme needs to die.
    - Ygg2 2y ago
      Whenever topic of FS arises, I always hear anecdata that btrfs/ext4 lost data and ZFS was smooth sailing.
      - nxicvyvy 2y ago
        Yes and not a single one of them can quote someone from this decade because it's a shitty internet myth that won't die.
        viraptor 2y ago
        Also everyone ignores the publicly visible zfs repo/issues. Corruption https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16631 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16631 crash/corruption https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16626 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16626 crash https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16623 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16623 just from this week. One of those filesystems is likely more stable than the other, but the image of perfect zfs is tiring.
hk1337 2y ago
> One of Stefano Marinelli's NetBSD boxes sat quietly serving for a decade, because everyone forgot about it. This is how Unix is meant to be. I remember someone mentioning they did this with Linux back in 1994 or 1995. Not for a decade obviously but it had been running for at least a year with no reboots or needing maintenance
- lproven 2y ago
  There's an order of magnitude difference between running for a year and a decade... That's a lot.
  - appendix-rock 2y ago
    Yep. Not rebooting for a decade is in most cases an irresponsible ‘advanced rookie’ move. I’m more than aware of the greybeard-era uptime fetishism. I’ve more than dabbled in it. I’ve typed /exec uptime into my IRC client more times than I dare admit. But come on… All that’s been said about security updates etc aside (some of which can be mitigated with that fancy in-place kernel update stuff), If something hasn’t rebooted in 10 years I’m going to be a bit nervous about what happens when it does reboot. If it’s in an uptime fetishist environment, chances are that it’ll be rebooted at a time that’s…inconvenient to say the least. Are you SURE that nothing has changed in that time? Some people are! Moreso than others at least. But that’s extra work, and my bet is most places with these high-uptime machines aren’t putting that work In, or think they are and are doing it poorly.
  - Delk 2y ago
    A couple of years ago at work, we came across a Linux (virtual) server related to a customer project that had been running for some 2.5 or 3 years since the last reboot. Pretty much by accident. I think we rebooted it for good measure (applying security updates, making sure it still booted cleanly, etc.) but there was no immediate need for doing that just to keep it functional. It's entirely possible that BSD is more stable and lends itself better to running for really long times uninterrupted. But Linux systems running for years really aren't unheard of, and by no means is one year the top of the range. Whether you should do that is another question. Over the course of a decade, there could well be even kernel-level vulnerabilities discovered, let alone ones in other services running on top of it. You might have a system running without a reboot for years as long as you make sure to update (and restart) user space services as needed. But leaving an entire server unattended for years doesn't sound like a good idea generally. That may not be as much of a concern if what the box is running is a limited set of services or functionality with little exposed surface. But that then comes more down to "what you're doing with it" rather than "which OS you're using". The generally less conservative development culture around Linux leans more towards moving fast and breaking things, although generally while trying to avoid the latter. Perhaps that makes things like low-level OS vulnerabilities or whether the system still restarts cleanly after a decade more important in the Linux land, and what counts as prudent administration in Linux might be less of a concern in BSD. But if you can have a BSD box running for a decade, with some particular set of services, in an internal network(?), and then compare that to someone else's report of a Linux box running for (at least) a year, in 1994 or 1995, probably running an entirely different workload, in a different environment (perhaps externally exposed?), and with no indication of why it may or may not have been restarted after that time, that's not really a fair comparison either.
lproven 2y ago
This is my article -- but it's also a dupe... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41776849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41776849
- toptrumps 2y ago
  Probably merged now
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
Every companies have linux servers with crazy uptimes. My server never crash, my linux desktop do. I assume they don't put BSD on their client's laptop.
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  If you need a stable desktop put z/OS on it, you normally don't reboot those til the end of the systems lifetime.
  - bionsystem 2y ago
    > If you need a stable desktop put z/OS on it You mean use a mainframe remotely ?
    - BSDobelix 2y ago
      Now that you say it, that would probably the simpler way. Or use MVS TK5 ;) https://www.prince-webdesign.nl/index.php/software/mvs-3-8j-turnkey-5 https://www.prince-webdesign.nl/index.php/software/mvs-3-8j-...
squarefoot 2y ago
A server whose uptime goes to X years is a server that wasn't updated in X years. I'm proud of my old XigmaNAS (FreeBSD) ~15 months uptime years ago that only a blackout did interrupt (yep, I had no UPS), and I write this as a mostly Linux user, but I'm not sure it's a good thing to aim for in production or in anything connected to the Internet.
- HL33tibCe7 2y ago
  Yeah, the article links another post which talks about a machine with a 9 year uptime as if it's a good thing. 9 years without a NetBSD release update (or kernel upgrade) is not something to be proud of.
  - BSDobelix 2y ago
    >9 years without a NetBSD release update (or kernel upgrade) is not something to be proud of. Not every system has to be connected to the internet....imagine that ;)
    - nonrandomstring 2y ago
      Whether something is connected to the internet or not wouldn't be my objection to the parents personal notion of "pride". I believe they're saying it would be irresponsible - in the current climate - to leave a system without upgrades and attention for so long. We can agree on that. That really only reflects the "current climate"; which is one of colossal dereliction and reckless engineering amounting to a total abandonment of cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is presently such a circus because of endemic poor software engineering, a worship of expedience, convenience, efficiency and plain old greed. These are all the reasons that good engineering and big business do not intersect in modern times. A couple of weeks ago Jen Easterly called out current industry practices as enabling cybercrime and harming society [0]. So not all unattended code is equal. I think there is a great deal of pride to be taken in building and using stable and reliable systems. That shows up in smaller groups, non-profits, and volunteer networks that are strongly focused on a smaller set of goals and who eschew giddy neophyte values in favour of a more sedate and responsible stance. But those are rather different flavours of "pride". I would characterise what the parent said as more an "absence of shame" for leaving what are evidently cheap-ass vulnerable systems that are "pwned out of the box" in a hostile environment. [0] https://www.cisa.gov/about/leadership/jen-easterly https://www.cisa.gov/about/leadership/jen-easterly
HL33tibCe7 2y ago
Switching your customers from Linux to BSD sounds like the opposite of the "boring" choice to me. The boring choice would be to leave them on their functioning Linux boxes. But I guess that wouldn't make an interesting conference talk.
- appendix-rock 2y ago
  “Boring” in this instance obviously means some weird tech culture virtue signal. The situations in which Linux isn’t at least ‘just fine’, and a BSD is better enough to justify SWITCHING, are, well, I’m skeptical of the author’s reasoning.
- jmclnx 2y ago
  >he boring choice would be to leave them on their functioning Linux boxes Depends upon the distro, Slackware is boring, others not so much. With the churn with systemd, Wayland on Linux, things are far from boring. On NetBSD, things cannot get any more boring. Plus I now believe Linux is owned by fortune 500 corporations and to me it is slowly heading down the same path as Microsoft Windows. NetBSD has long support time lines for their releases. Configuration (admin) has not changed much at all. I think pkgsrc is great, I wish this could become a standard across various OSs :) All you need to do is find supported hardware. Thinkpads tend to be good, NetBSD on my T430 has no problems at all. The only NetBSD complaint I have is I cannot yet figure out how to get wireguard working correctly as a client. But wg is still considered experimental so hoping the issues are resolved in 10.1. The existing docs I do not understand at all, but I always had a block in my head when it came to network admin.
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  The term "boring" just means "stuff I'm familiar with" 99% of the time in online technical conversations. That's how stuff like PHP gets bundled with "boring tech" but node or similar are somehow seen as a complicated mess by some. It's just familiarity disguised as sound technical analysis lol.
boricj 2y ago
I'm currently building my homelab and I'm seriously considering SmartOS as a hypervisor. I've never used Solaris or illumos before, but I'm looking for something bullet-proof, idiot-proof and maintenance-free. The mainstream solution would probably be Proxmox and while I know how to administrate a Debian system, I don't trust myself as a sysadmin while acting in a personal capacity. Proxmox intrinsically just doesn't bring the peace of mind that I won't accidentally blow it up while away from my apartment. Just because a solution isn't mainstream doesn't mean it's not worth taking a look at. Even if you don't end up selecting them, it brings a healthy perspective that you wouldn't have otherwise.
- timc3 2y ago
  I’ve run SmartOS, but mainly use OmniOS. As with all these, they are very good but make sure to run them on supported hardware. They have good documentation, very small community, and if you run into problems then debugging them is very possible - but not for the technically challenged. OmniOS I basically run as an appliance and has been trouble free since the start.
  - BSDobelix 2y ago
    OmniOS is a incredible good illumos distribution, i think Oxide build their internal distribution with OmniOS as the "base". illumos Distribution comparison: https://illumos.org/docs/about/distro/ https://illumos.org/docs/about/distro/
appendix-rock 2y ago
I don’t buy this article. > Clients are often influenced by hype. A few years ago, it was "Linux is a toy." Now, it's "Why bhyve and not Proxmox?" They ask, "How can they sell FreeBSD? There's no AI, there's no Cloud, there's no Kubernetes, there's no blockchain – there's nothing!" I am very confident that this is more ‘fan fiction’ than the author would like to admit. The sort of hypothetical that someone cooks up on their head to anger up the blood and to then self-soothe by thinking about how much better than everyone else they are. Why does everything have to be so bloody religious? If you like boring tech, stop politicising it.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
  You sure? I made a semi-successful blockchain based product 5 years ago. At two, separate employers, I was urged to make a blockchain based solution to.. well actually the problem was not described in either case, only the use of blockchain.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    If the described people understand so little about tech, it doesn't even matter what they say. You can try to educate them or say something even more BS for them to agree with (blockchain 2 on kubershmetes).
- mst 2y ago
  The vast majority of the comments on this article are people being religious about Linux. I'll be over here running a mixture of Debian Stable and FreeBSD and wondering why everybody insists on getting so angry about these things.
- krick 2y ago
  Yeah, as if Linux has AI and Blockchain and these don't exist on BSD systems... Admittedly, Linux really isn't boring enough for me. By boring I mean I don't really want to notice that OS exists, I want a distro that has most answers to any noob question on Google, all drivers for all hardware out of the box, no fancy package managers like snap or cool future technology like ZFS, no way to shoot myself in the foot however hard I try... But in fact almost all cool future technology comes to Linux from BSD, but it has less drivers, less packets, and googling yields less results. Everything else is pretty much the same everywhere and always comes with caveats.
28304283409234 2y ago
All the home-server setups of my colleagues are tiny Kubernetes setups in various ways. Breaking down in various ways. Mine is a Debian box. Upgraded from Debian 10 to 11 to 12. Running all kinds of things. I only use Debian packages alongside one or two Docker containers. Linux can do boring just fine.
- bionsystem 2y ago
  Debian is incredible and I think there is a lot of mutual respect between both communities (debian and freebsd ; debian is even the default choice for the linux compatibility layer). I wish Debian GNU/kFreeBSD would be a thing...
  - hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
    Debian is the FreeBSD of the Linuxes, and FreeBSD is the Debian of the BSDs.
- RALaBarge 2y ago
  Proxmox runs on top of Debian by default, which is a fun and easy way to increase the layers of abstraction. All of my homelab stuff, my DNS server, and different things run on Proxmox, running on an old T430 on my bookshelf.
28304283409234 2y ago
From the blog post linked in the article: > The largest failure was with btrfs — after a reboot, a 50 TB filesystem (in mirror, for backups) simply stopped working. RAID is not a backup.
- georgyo 2y ago
  Agreed, raid is not backup. But restoring 50TB of data from actual backups take a lot of time. I like BTRFS to a fair degree, but thae fact that _any_ two drives failing in its "raid 10" configuration causes data loss is not obvious or intuitive.
  - 28304283409234 2y ago
    If one has 50TB(!!) of mission critical data, one should not store it on one machine running btrfs. That is just silly. No many how many mirrors you throw at it.
- timc3 2y ago
  It sounded to me more like the system was being used for Backups, not that they expect RAID to be a backup.
andrewstuart 2y ago
I just don’t buy the story that Linux is unreliable. It’s kind of a ridiculous thing to claim without very substantial proof. I think it’s made up to justify installing BSD.
- timc3 2y ago
  It’s not inherently unreliable, but can be a bit depending in what you are doing. Debian stable on very mainstream server hardware is fine. Newer filesystems, cutting edge kernels, interesting hardware and your results may vary.
kstenerud 2y ago
I've also read the original blog that this article spawns from. The gist of it is: "I switched to BSD during Linux's bad period, and now I'm comfortable with it so I'll stick with it". And hey, more power to you. But the thing is, the world has moved on. Linux is stable now. Linux containerization and VM tech is good now. The storage technologies are cross-platform now (I've had zero data loss since using zfs). The moat has shrunk. So then, what are we left with? * BSD is less common, so there are fewer CVEs on it. Hackers aren't stupid; they target popular platforms. You get plenty of CVEs for Apple systems (which are BSD, btw). * Of course, since BSD is less common, it's harder to find employees who are wizards with it. * Everyone releases for Linux first, so on some things you either have to wait, or do it yourself (or stick it in a Linux VM, at which point...) * Licensing bites people all the time, but it's hardly a catastrophic thing; merely the normal politics that occur when things get big enough, and enough money is involved. You win by paying good money to hire the better legal team. So what true benefit is there to using BSD over Linux? Other than satisfying your own self or going with what you're already familiar with, not much.
- technothrasher 2y ago
  > the world has moved on This is exactly why I migrated my systems to Linux. I still prefer BSD honestly, having "grown up" with SunOS and then moving to FreeBSD very early, it's where I'm most comfortable. But it started to get so that it was noticably harder to keep my software up to date and functioning on BSD when it is often an afterthought for many projects now, or only supported by third party work. I may not like it (in fact, I don't) but Linux is definitely the easier path for most things these days.
- parkcedar 2y ago
  Mac isn’t really BSD, it’s a common misconception. It shares some of the userland code, but it’s a vastly different kernel (derived from the Mach microkernel). The userland has diverged quite significantly now too. Though, I guess it probably is closer to BSD than Linux
  - BSDobelix 2y ago
    >but it’s a vastly different kernel (derived from the Mach microkernel). XNU is a combination of a FreeBSD-Kernel (Networking, Filesystem, etc) and a Mach-Kernel (scheduling, ipc, virtual-memory etc): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7GMHB3Plc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7GMHB3Plc8
cowsandmilk 2y ago
> easy deployment isn't as important as easy longterm maintenance and support This veers close to treating your servers as pets instead of cattle. Which is fine if you’re small ( 99% of services are ), but not great if you have thousands of servers and scale up and down routinely. That said, I don’t feel like that quote actually represents BSD vs Linux at all. You can have easy deploys and long term maintenance on either.
jmrm 2y ago
After reading the article and the comments, I sincerely don't know why use BSD outside programming a server software that use `pledge()` and `jail()` system calls, like when people make [BCHS servers](https://learnbchs.org/index.html https://learnbchs.org/index.html). Maybe I'm biased because I had worse experience making FreeBSD and OpenBSD in a desktop than with Gentoo, but I think working Modern Linux distros are as customizable, as stable, and with a lot more community and professionals working on them than any BSD one, and with a business in mind, that last detail is really important.
le-mark 2y ago
Reminds me of a new cto who, coming from a windows server background, demanded we reboot the servers (Linux) to prepare for the holiday rush (e-commerce site, mid oughts). Our admins had to explain we don’t do that. He persisted, so the admins stayed late and then went for beers, not rebooting a thing. Iirc this was outside of a maintenance window, and it simply wasn’t necessary.
zicd 2y ago
Sounds fun, not boring to me

87 points by dazzawazza 2y ago

I'm halfway through switching all of my personal machines from Linux to BSD for pretty much this exact reason. It's going very well so far.

bionsystem 2y ago
I wish I could do that but I can't recall any employer that would have allowed that. One of my employer was around 90% Solaris though (10 and 11) over 5000+ hostnames (VMs, zones and physical) and it required very little maintenance, a team of 3 seasoned ops was enough to do everything up to L2/L3.
amelius 2y ago
I'm stuck with Linux on an nVidia Jetson that is locked by the manufacturer to Ubuntu :(
- guelermus 2y ago
  There is a Yocto solutin in Github. But I don't know how good it is about NVIDIA AI libraries. https://github.com/OE4T/meta-tegra https://github.com/OE4T/meta-tegra

jl6 2y ago

I feel that “it just works and you don’t need to maintain it” is less an OS feature, and more about what you are doing with it.

jimnotgym 2y ago
I agree. I have had several services run for a decade on a company LAN using Linux. They did boring things well. They will still work in 20 years if the hardware is still there.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  To be fair I've had Debian boxes with uptimes of many years and service lives of a decade. A sarge install doing nothing but DNS (on metal not VM) from 2006 lasted until 2015. So it isn't just a Linux - BSD thing it's a mindset of simplicity and focus of function. But since about 2020 my love for Debian waned, what with the systemd and ugly internal politics. Nowadays I'm inclined to look at whether a BSD or other operating system [0] might be a good fit for someones needs. Basically I find the most mature mindset exists wherever it's furthest away from the GAFAM/Bigtech values which corrupt, over-complicate everything and try to suck you into ongoing unstable dependency relation. Using "unfashionable" technology is pretty much always a win in my experience. [0] https://www.techradar.com/news/best-alternative-operating-systems https://www.techradar.com/news/best-alternative-operating-sy...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    It's interesting, because around 2004-06 was when I struggled mightily with hardware issues, especially audio, and Chris Siebenmann was the one who urged me to "install Ubuntu and be done with it." And Ubuntu really was the value-add, turnkey solution for someone who needed a desktop system as "daily driver" without endless tinkering and custom fixes. But by 2018, Ubuntu was making enough proprietary additions that I didn't need, and I began to notice Debian's maturity and feature parity. But Debian still had a reputation for being extremely stable. So some new installs were Debian, and in 2018 when I purchased a Lenovo notebook, some were Ubuntu-certified, and I chose Red Hat certified, which ultimately ran Fedora quite smoothly. (There were no BSD-certified notebooks.)
steeleduncan 2y ago
Yes, the most concrete issue the article mentions is losing data on Btrfs, but that is well known to be a flaky, semi-experimental file system, the operating system has very little to do with it. The equivalent would be running Debian on ext4 Also, the article mentions Kubernetes a few times, which quite fairly has a reputation for massive complexity, but is again entirely optional, and a piece of software entirely separate from the operating system. I agree with the basic point of achieving reliability by using the simplest technology available, but the focus on the operating system for me is misguided here, and at best a temporary fix. If BSD were to catch on for that reason, Kubernetes would be ported to BSD, and the same problem would arise there
- nxicvyvy 2y ago
  It's also a 10 years out of date complaint. Btrfs has been stable for fucking ages. That meme needs to die.
  - Ygg2 2y ago
    Whenever topic of FS arises, I always hear anecdata that btrfs/ext4 lost data and ZFS was smooth sailing.
    - nxicvyvy 2y ago
      Yes and not a single one of them can quote someone from this decade because it's a shitty internet myth that won't die.
      - viraptor 2y ago
        Also everyone ignores the publicly visible zfs repo/issues. Corruption https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16631 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16631 crash/corruption https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16626 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16626 crash https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16623 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/16623 just from this week. One of those filesystems is likely more stable than the other, but the image of perfect zfs is tiring.

hk1337 2y ago

> One of Stefano Marinelli's NetBSD boxes sat quietly serving for a decade, because everyone forgot about it. This is how Unix is meant to be. I remember someone mentioning they did this with Linux back in 1994 or 1995. Not for a decade obviously but it had been running for at least a year with no reboots or needing maintenance

lproven 2y ago
There's an order of magnitude difference between running for a year and a decade... That's a lot.
- appendix-rock 2y ago
  Yep. Not rebooting for a decade is in most cases an irresponsible ‘advanced rookie’ move. I’m more than aware of the greybeard-era uptime fetishism. I’ve more than dabbled in it. I’ve typed /exec uptime into my IRC client more times than I dare admit. But come on… All that’s been said about security updates etc aside (some of which can be mitigated with that fancy in-place kernel update stuff), If something hasn’t rebooted in 10 years I’m going to be a bit nervous about what happens when it does reboot. If it’s in an uptime fetishist environment, chances are that it’ll be rebooted at a time that’s…inconvenient to say the least. Are you SURE that nothing has changed in that time? Some people are! Moreso than others at least. But that’s extra work, and my bet is most places with these high-uptime machines aren’t putting that work In, or think they are and are doing it poorly.
- Delk 2y ago
  A couple of years ago at work, we came across a Linux (virtual) server related to a customer project that had been running for some 2.5 or 3 years since the last reboot. Pretty much by accident. I think we rebooted it for good measure (applying security updates, making sure it still booted cleanly, etc.) but there was no immediate need for doing that just to keep it functional. It's entirely possible that BSD is more stable and lends itself better to running for really long times uninterrupted. But Linux systems running for years really aren't unheard of, and by no means is one year the top of the range. Whether you should do that is another question. Over the course of a decade, there could well be even kernel-level vulnerabilities discovered, let alone ones in other services running on top of it. You might have a system running without a reboot for years as long as you make sure to update (and restart) user space services as needed. But leaving an entire server unattended for years doesn't sound like a good idea generally. That may not be as much of a concern if what the box is running is a limited set of services or functionality with little exposed surface. But that then comes more down to "what you're doing with it" rather than "which OS you're using". The generally less conservative development culture around Linux leans more towards moving fast and breaking things, although generally while trying to avoid the latter. Perhaps that makes things like low-level OS vulnerabilities or whether the system still restarts cleanly after a decade more important in the Linux land, and what counts as prudent administration in Linux might be less of a concern in BSD. But if you can have a BSD box running for a decade, with some particular set of services, in an internal network(?), and then compare that to someone else's report of a Linux box running for (at least) a year, in 1994 or 1995, probably running an entirely different workload, in a different environment (perhaps externally exposed?), and with no indication of why it may or may not have been restarted after that time, that's not really a fair comparison either.

lproven 2y ago

This is my article -- but it's also a dupe... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41776849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41776849

toptrumps 2y ago
Probably merged now

BiteCode_dev 2y ago

Every companies have linux servers with crazy uptimes. My server never crash, my linux desktop do. I assume they don't put BSD on their client's laptop.

BSDobelix 2y ago
If you need a stable desktop put z/OS on it, you normally don't reboot those til the end of the systems lifetime.
- bionsystem 2y ago
  > If you need a stable desktop put z/OS on it You mean use a mainframe remotely ?
  - BSDobelix 2y ago
    Now that you say it, that would probably the simpler way. Or use MVS TK5 ;) https://www.prince-webdesign.nl/index.php/software/mvs-3-8j-turnkey-5 https://www.prince-webdesign.nl/index.php/software/mvs-3-8j-...

squarefoot 2y ago

A server whose uptime goes to X years is a server that wasn't updated in X years. I'm proud of my old XigmaNAS (FreeBSD) ~15 months uptime years ago that only a blackout did interrupt (yep, I had no UPS), and I write this as a mostly Linux user, but I'm not sure it's a good thing to aim for in production or in anything connected to the Internet.

HL33tibCe7 2y ago
Yeah, the article links another post which talks about a machine with a 9 year uptime as if it's a good thing. 9 years without a NetBSD release update (or kernel upgrade) is not something to be proud of.
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  >9 years without a NetBSD release update (or kernel upgrade) is not something to be proud of. Not every system has to be connected to the internet....imagine that ;)
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    Whether something is connected to the internet or not wouldn't be my objection to the parents personal notion of "pride". I believe they're saying it would be irresponsible - in the current climate - to leave a system without upgrades and attention for so long. We can agree on that. That really only reflects the "current climate"; which is one of colossal dereliction and reckless engineering amounting to a total abandonment of cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is presently such a circus because of endemic poor software engineering, a worship of expedience, convenience, efficiency and plain old greed. These are all the reasons that good engineering and big business do not intersect in modern times. A couple of weeks ago Jen Easterly called out current industry practices as enabling cybercrime and harming society [0]. So not all unattended code is equal. I think there is a great deal of pride to be taken in building and using stable and reliable systems. That shows up in smaller groups, non-profits, and volunteer networks that are strongly focused on a smaller set of goals and who eschew giddy neophyte values in favour of a more sedate and responsible stance. But those are rather different flavours of "pride". I would characterise what the parent said as more an "absence of shame" for leaving what are evidently cheap-ass vulnerable systems that are "pwned out of the box" in a hostile environment. [0] https://www.cisa.gov/about/leadership/jen-easterly https://www.cisa.gov/about/leadership/jen-easterly

HL33tibCe7 2y ago

Switching your customers from Linux to BSD sounds like the opposite of the "boring" choice to me. The boring choice would be to leave them on their functioning Linux boxes. But I guess that wouldn't make an interesting conference talk.

appendix-rock 2y ago
“Boring” in this instance obviously means some weird tech culture virtue signal. The situations in which Linux isn’t at least ‘just fine’, and a BSD is better enough to justify SWITCHING, are, well, I’m skeptical of the author’s reasoning.
jmclnx 2y ago
>he boring choice would be to leave them on their functioning Linux boxes Depends upon the distro, Slackware is boring, others not so much. With the churn with systemd, Wayland on Linux, things are far from boring. On NetBSD, things cannot get any more boring. Plus I now believe Linux is owned by fortune 500 corporations and to me it is slowly heading down the same path as Microsoft Windows. NetBSD has long support time lines for their releases. Configuration (admin) has not changed much at all. I think pkgsrc is great, I wish this could become a standard across various OSs :) All you need to do is find supported hardware. Thinkpads tend to be good, NetBSD on my T430 has no problems at all. The only NetBSD complaint I have is I cannot yet figure out how to get wireguard working correctly as a client. But wg is still considered experimental so hoping the issues are resolved in 10.1. The existing docs I do not understand at all, but I always had a block in my head when it came to network admin.
mardifoufs 2y ago
The term "boring" just means "stuff I'm familiar with" 99% of the time in online technical conversations. That's how stuff like PHP gets bundled with "boring tech" but node or similar are somehow seen as a complicated mess by some. It's just familiarity disguised as sound technical analysis lol.

boricj 2y ago

I'm currently building my homelab and I'm seriously considering SmartOS as a hypervisor. I've never used Solaris or illumos before, but I'm looking for something bullet-proof, idiot-proof and maintenance-free. The mainstream solution would probably be Proxmox and while I know how to administrate a Debian system, I don't trust myself as a sysadmin while acting in a personal capacity. Proxmox intrinsically just doesn't bring the peace of mind that I won't accidentally blow it up while away from my apartment. Just because a solution isn't mainstream doesn't mean it's not worth taking a look at. Even if you don't end up selecting them, it brings a healthy perspective that you wouldn't have otherwise.

timc3 2y ago
I’ve run SmartOS, but mainly use OmniOS. As with all these, they are very good but make sure to run them on supported hardware. They have good documentation, very small community, and if you run into problems then debugging them is very possible - but not for the technically challenged. OmniOS I basically run as an appliance and has been trouble free since the start.
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  OmniOS is a incredible good illumos distribution, i think Oxide build their internal distribution with OmniOS as the "base". illumos Distribution comparison: https://illumos.org/docs/about/distro/ https://illumos.org/docs/about/distro/

appendix-rock 2y ago

I don’t buy this article. > Clients are often influenced by hype. A few years ago, it was "Linux is a toy." Now, it's "Why bhyve and not Proxmox?" They ask, "How can they sell FreeBSD? There's no AI, there's no Cloud, there's no Kubernetes, there's no blockchain – there's nothing!" I am very confident that this is more ‘fan fiction’ than the author would like to admit. The sort of hypothetical that someone cooks up on their head to anger up the blood and to then self-soothe by thinking about how much better than everyone else they are. Why does everything have to be so bloody religious? If you like boring tech, stop politicising it.

OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
You sure? I made a semi-successful blockchain based product 5 years ago. At two, separate employers, I was urged to make a blockchain based solution to.. well actually the problem was not described in either case, only the use of blockchain.
- viraptor 2y ago
  If the described people understand so little about tech, it doesn't even matter what they say. You can try to educate them or say something even more BS for them to agree with (blockchain 2 on kubershmetes).
mst 2y ago
The vast majority of the comments on this article are people being religious about Linux. I'll be over here running a mixture of Debian Stable and FreeBSD and wondering why everybody insists on getting so angry about these things.
krick 2y ago
Yeah, as if Linux has AI and Blockchain and these don't exist on BSD systems... Admittedly, Linux really isn't boring enough for me. By boring I mean I don't really want to notice that OS exists, I want a distro that has most answers to any noob question on Google, all drivers for all hardware out of the box, no fancy package managers like snap or cool future technology like ZFS, no way to shoot myself in the foot however hard I try... But in fact almost all cool future technology comes to Linux from BSD, but it has less drivers, less packets, and googling yields less results. Everything else is pretty much the same everywhere and always comes with caveats.

28304283409234 2y ago

All the home-server setups of my colleagues are tiny Kubernetes setups in various ways. Breaking down in various ways. Mine is a Debian box. Upgraded from Debian 10 to 11 to 12. Running all kinds of things. I only use Debian packages alongside one or two Docker containers. Linux can do boring just fine.

bionsystem 2y ago
Debian is incredible and I think there is a lot of mutual respect between both communities (debian and freebsd ; debian is even the default choice for the linux compatibility layer). I wish Debian GNU/kFreeBSD would be a thing...
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  Debian is the FreeBSD of the Linuxes, and FreeBSD is the Debian of the BSDs.
RALaBarge 2y ago
Proxmox runs on top of Debian by default, which is a fun and easy way to increase the layers of abstraction. All of my homelab stuff, my DNS server, and different things run on Proxmox, running on an old T430 on my bookshelf.

28304283409234 2y ago

From the blog post linked in the article: > The largest failure was with btrfs — after a reboot, a 50 TB filesystem (in mirror, for backups) simply stopped working. RAID is not a backup.

georgyo 2y ago
Agreed, raid is not backup. But restoring 50TB of data from actual backups take a lot of time. I like BTRFS to a fair degree, but thae fact that _any_ two drives failing in its "raid 10" configuration causes data loss is not obvious or intuitive.
- 28304283409234 2y ago
  If one has 50TB(!!) of mission critical data, one should not store it on one machine running btrfs. That is just silly. No many how many mirrors you throw at it.
timc3 2y ago
It sounded to me more like the system was being used for Backups, not that they expect RAID to be a backup.

andrewstuart 2y ago

I just don’t buy the story that Linux is unreliable. It’s kind of a ridiculous thing to claim without very substantial proof. I think it’s made up to justify installing BSD.

timc3 2y ago
It’s not inherently unreliable, but can be a bit depending in what you are doing. Debian stable on very mainstream server hardware is fine. Newer filesystems, cutting edge kernels, interesting hardware and your results may vary.

kstenerud 2y ago

I've also read the original blog that this article spawns from. The gist of it is: "I switched to BSD during Linux's bad period, and now I'm comfortable with it so I'll stick with it". And hey, more power to you. But the thing is, the world has moved on. Linux is stable now. Linux containerization and VM tech is good now. The storage technologies are cross-platform now (I've had zero data loss since using zfs). The moat has shrunk. So then, what are we left with? * BSD is less common, so there are fewer CVEs on it. Hackers aren't stupid; they target popular platforms. You get plenty of CVEs for Apple systems (which are BSD, btw). * Of course, since BSD is less common, it's harder to find employees who are wizards with it. * Everyone releases for Linux first, so on some things you either have to wait, or do it yourself (or stick it in a Linux VM, at which point...) * Licensing bites people all the time, but it's hardly a catastrophic thing; merely the normal politics that occur when things get big enough, and enough money is involved. You win by paying good money to hire the better legal team. So what true benefit is there to using BSD over Linux? Other than satisfying your own self or going with what you're already familiar with, not much.

technothrasher 2y ago
> the world has moved on This is exactly why I migrated my systems to Linux. I still prefer BSD honestly, having "grown up" with SunOS and then moving to FreeBSD very early, it's where I'm most comfortable. But it started to get so that it was noticably harder to keep my software up to date and functioning on BSD when it is often an afterthought for many projects now, or only supported by third party work. I may not like it (in fact, I don't) but Linux is definitely the easier path for most things these days.
parkcedar 2y ago
Mac isn’t really BSD, it’s a common misconception. It shares some of the userland code, but it’s a vastly different kernel (derived from the Mach microkernel). The userland has diverged quite significantly now too. Though, I guess it probably is closer to BSD than Linux
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  >but it’s a vastly different kernel (derived from the Mach microkernel). XNU is a combination of a FreeBSD-Kernel (Networking, Filesystem, etc) and a Mach-Kernel (scheduling, ipc, virtual-memory etc): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7GMHB3Plc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7GMHB3Plc8

cowsandmilk 2y ago

> easy deployment isn't as important as easy longterm maintenance and support This veers close to treating your servers as pets instead of cattle. Which is fine if you’re small ( 99% of services are ), but not great if you have thousands of servers and scale up and down routinely. That said, I don’t feel like that quote actually represents BSD vs Linux at all. You can have easy deploys and long term maintenance on either.

jmrm 2y ago

After reading the article and the comments, I sincerely don't know why use BSD outside programming a server software that use `pledge()` and `jail()` system calls, like when people make [BCHS servers](https://learnbchs.org/index.html https://learnbchs.org/index.html). Maybe I'm biased because I had worse experience making FreeBSD and OpenBSD in a desktop than with Gentoo, but I think working Modern Linux distros are as customizable, as stable, and with a lot more community and professionals working on them than any BSD one, and with a business in mind, that last detail is really important.

le-mark 2y ago

Reminds me of a new cto who, coming from a windows server background, demanded we reboot the servers (Linux) to prepare for the holiday rush (e-commerce site, mid oughts). Our admins had to explain we don’t do that. He persisted, so the admins stayed late and then went for beers, not rebooting a thing. Iirc this was outside of a maintenance window, and it simply wasn’t necessary.

zicd 2y ago

Sounds fun, not boring to me