7 ms·

Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

374 points by speckx 6mo ago

LoganDark 6mo ago
> I don’t know why fastfetch always report more memory being used than the actual values. I’ve never seen more than 3GiB used in btop for this server My guess would be that fastfetch probably reports actual memory usage while btop probably reports the total usage of all processes. The former is probably higher because of things like filesystem caching
lnenad 6mo ago
I love people that aren't afraid to experiment and learn. As someone that hasn't had a formal education in software engineering (just in other kind of engineering) I learned the most by doing and failing.
- elevation 6mo ago
  Formal education doesn't typically emphasize this kind of learning. Univerity CS classes will focus on data structures, algorithms, languages, turing machines and finite automata and how they relate to computability. If you're a university student and want to learn OpenBSD administration or how to host your own blog, or just how to use VSCode, these are all extracurriculars.
andix 6mo ago
Slightly off topic: What's currently the free Linux distribution with the longest support cycle? For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because it got security updates for a really long time. With minimal risk of breaking things on updates. PS: after a bit of research Alma/Rocky Linux are probably the best choices for now. 10 years of support. But are they maintained well?
- KennyBlanken 6mo ago
  Probably Debian or Ubuntu. The question is...why do you care that much? I've upgraded Debian stable (both pure and with some cherry-picked backports) and Ubuntu (non-LTS and LTS) systems in place and rarely broken anything, for years and years. When stuff has broken it's been a quick google and then slapping myself for not having read the upgrade guide. I do generally wait about 2-3 weeks before upgrading, giving time for them to catch stuff that was missed until the great masses were set loose on it.
  - andix 6mo ago
    > why do you care that much? I've had issues with Ubuntu/Debian upgrades more than once. Some third party binaries breaking with the update. Or some specific config tweaks that break, because the structure of /etc changed too much. For some small VM with a specific purpose I prefer a distribution that changes as little as possible for as long as possible. Less work, more uptime.
    - irishcoffee 6mo ago
      I won't touch ubuntu unless forced to by some obscure work requirement. I've had enough bad experiences with repos being shut down, updates/upgrades breaking unanticipated, obscure things, and I hate snap. The naming conventions drive me crazy as well. When you deal with 2 things that have dumbshit naming conventions, like ubuntu and ROS, its really obnoxious to pretend to case enough to keep track of.
  - nightfly 6mo ago
    > The question is...why do you care that much? Not the OP, but I support Ubuntu as desktop and server OS for an engineering collage and have for 10ish years. Some LTS upgrades don't require many changes (mostly minor package name changes) and some take months of work to get rolled out (mostly for workstations, the server upgrades are usually quick.). Not everything gets upgraded every new OS release. If we had to upgrade everything every 6-12 months it would eat up a significant amount of time for our small team.
    - 6mo ago
- secabeen 6mo ago
  Alma and Rocky if you want fully free or have a lot of machines. RHEL if you are okay with registering with them; they give ten machines free access to their updates for each Registered account in their system. RHEL is definitely the most stable major distribution. Alma and Rocky are essentially downstream clones of RHEL.
- pm2222 6mo ago
  Use a rolling release like Arch and it’s supported forever.
  - andix 6mo ago
    I need to enable automatic updates, because I don't have the time to manually update. I have a few machines on Open SuSE Tubleweed, and stuff just randomly breaks. A few months ago there was a weird Kernel bug that just froze all of them. They update and reboot every day, and suddenly it all worked well again. A bit too exciting for me :)
    - delicious_apple 6mo ago
      You can always try openSUSE Slowroll (in beta), which is a rolling release that updates less frequently than Tumbleweed. It advertises better stability. https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Slowroll https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Slowroll
  - wolvoleo 6mo ago
    But then you have constant maintenance. I prefer rolling distros, don't get me wrong. But it does mean you will get the latest of every package constantly and some cause problems. For a box that sits in a corner doing its joband you don't want to pay attention to it's not a good choice IMO. On a desktop you want the latest of everything on and you have time to keep up it's the best.
    - computerfriend 6mo ago
      I have an Arch server that has been online for ten years (yikes), never had any issues with it.
      - TylerE 6mo ago
        > never had any issues with it. You've never NOTICED any issues. Which is far from the same claim...
- mhitza 6mo ago
  > But are they maintained well? Alma has a few affordances as it's no longer RHEL source compatible, which means it could ship priviledge escalation fixes with new kernel updates faster. Rocky responded with an extra, optional to enable, security repo to provide mitigations to the exploits while waiting for RHEL to downstream. Look pretty well maintained to me. If only judging by recent events.
  - gh02t 6mo ago
    Rocky's docs are also really nice. They aren't as thorough as RedHat's, but they're much more readable and concise, and tend to be written for a less enterprise-y audience.
    - mhitza 6mo ago
      Don't even remind me about the RedHat docs, lol. Their solutions pages used to be readable with an account, now I think you need a subscription too. The manuals, indeed are good, though for more esoteric issues I land too often on a gated answer page.
      - doubled112 6mo ago
        You can use the free developer subscription for documentation even if you don't plan to use your 16 RHEL licenses.
      - infinet 6mo ago
        Content wise the RedHat docs are great, but navigating the doc has a wired feeling that is hard to describe. Everything is black and white, the page has low information density perhaps because of the line space or paragraph space; the typesetting of command line and configure examples is not clear separated from surrounding text; mouse cannot select text of the command line examples; the page top is distracting because it keeps showing and disappearing as mouse scrolls up and down. Somehow the left navigation pane is also difficult to follow, easy to get lost when trying to find a section.
  - andix 6mo ago
- BadBadJellyBean 6mo ago
  You are betting that whatever you host doesn't live as long as the upgrade cycle because it'll probably be a pain when the upgrades finally arrive. I'd rather have smaller version jumps more often than a huge jump with everything changing after a long time.
  - andix 6mo ago
    It usually doesn't live until the end of the support cycle. And if it does I will probably migrate it to a fresh VM instead of upgrading the distribution.
    - 6031769 6mo ago
      Completely agree. A fresh install beats an in-place major version upgrade every time. Less hazardous and gives an easy path to clear out all the accumulated crud.
    - BadBadJellyBean 6mo ago
      I'm not worried about upgrading. I'm worried about the whole environment being potentially several versions newer than the old one. All shared libraries. All services. Everything new. And now you have to make a software that has had little upgrades run on that. Have fun.
- tannhaeuser 6mo ago
  Debian LTS/extended LTS
  - andix 6mo ago
    5 years is not a lot. It releases every 2 years, so it requires upgrading at least every 4 years. In the worst case it's just 3 years of support, if you install right before the next release. ELTS is 10 years and paid. It's great that it exists, but not relevant for my toy projects.
    - WJW 6mo ago
      So there is a project that you care enough about to keep it alive, but 1-2 hours every FOUR YEARS is too much? At some point I just have to call you lazy dude. Either the 1-2 hours is a drop in the bucket compared to what you spend on it anyway (like a blog you still regularly update), or you don't actively update the project but still care enough about it to spend half an evening every few years, or you should just admit you don't care about it enough anymore to do even that. In the last case just delete the project.
      - andix 6mo ago
        Yes, I'm lazy. And that's fine.
      - cocoto 6mo ago
        It can be way more than 2 hours depending on the project.
      - com2kid 6mo ago
        > So there is a project that you care enough about to keep it alive, but 1-2 hours every FOUR YEARS is too much? At some point I just have to call you lazy dude. I want the machine that serves my static blog pages to have, ideally, 0 maintenance. It needs to do one thing, serve some static HTTP pages and have new pages pushed to it. Quite frankly I wish some of those "minimal docker first OSs" had taken off.
- nextos 6mo ago
  I would say NixOS, where it is trivial to switch across releases, run software from different releases, and perform rollbacks. I have been running NixOS on several servers for more than a decade. No reinstalling, upgrading, or any breaks whatsoever.
  - indemnity 6mo ago
    I run nixOS as well on my home infrastructure (gateway/firewall, a couple of internal servers). But I have had, uh, non-trivial breakages happen also when I upgrade the system itself to the next yearly release. Non-bootable kernel kind of breakages. But I will give you that I can just boot from the generation before the upgrade, and it works again. So there's that :)
  - tombert 6mo ago
    I've only been running NixOS (in any serious capacity) for three years, but I have installed it on every computer that I am allowed to install it on now. It has been the most headache-free Linux I've used, simply because I'm less scared to play with and fix stuff. The fact that rollbacks are trivial and snapshots are automatic, and since everything is declarative in a text file anyway, I am way braver. If I do something like screw up the video driver, or the wifi driver or make it so the system doesn't boot anymore, all I need to do is reboot and choose a previous generation.
    - andix 6mo ago
      > simply because I'm less scared to play with and fix stuff. The main reason of a LTS distribution is not having to play around and fix stuff. Install something once, and it keeps running without any changes, but still gets security updates.
      - tombert 6mo ago
        Yeah, but I find that particularly with laptops, even with LTS releases, there's almost always something you need to fix. For example, there's a weird quirk with my laptop that if I am using a USB keyboard and stop typing for more than a minute, it "powers down", and if when I start typing again it misses the first four or five characters, which is very annoying. The solution involved putting a few boot parameters and then it works fine and as expected, but I would be reluctant to do that with Ubuntu or really any non-NixOS distro, because if I screw up a boot param I get into a situation where the computer won't, you know, boot, meaning I'm stuck screwing around with grub commands and trying to fix things, which is annoying. With NixOS, if I screw things up it's like a minute of rebooting and choosing the old generation. Not to mention that if you have a non-declarative OS, it can be hard to know what exactly is on the computer. When I ran an Ubuntu LTS server, I eventually had installed dozens of packages that I don't think were being used but it was hard to know for sure which ones were necessary and which ones weren't. When I'm using NixOS all the packages are unambiguously in the configuration.nix. "Uninstalling" a program (including its transitive dependencies) is just removing that package out of the configuration.nix and rebuilding. I have nothing against LTS releases, but I do think that at least for laptops (which can have kind of arcane hardware quirks) it's better to use NixOS.
- ezst 6mo ago
  For a while (a decade+), I was running CentOS on my servers on the same assumption of long time stability and ensuing peace of mind. Then I figured that over such durations, the ecosystem drift becomes significant and keeping applications up to date and running on top of the OS becomes an increasing challenge (with the more "infrastructure" packages like glibc, python/Apache combos, GCC, ... slowly becoming incompatible with the latest applicative stack). Then I figured that version upgrades were miserable, not just because I had painted myself in a weird corner with ungodly packages mix-ups, but because the upgrade path was always best-effort. I think I gave up during the 6 to 7 transition, as I realised that all I needed was fedora: with yearly or half-yearly updates I have no need to fight the distro's packages: stuff stays current and in working order, major distro upgrades go smoothly, downtime is minimal. I'm not considering going back to any "server distribution" ever.
  - andix 6mo ago
    > slowly becoming incompatible with the latest applicative stack LTS distributions are great if your applications don't change (much), or are explicitly compatible with the specific distribution you run them on.
- pull_my_finger 6mo ago
  [dead]
- Tepix 6mo ago
  Ubuntu Pro is free for up to 5 systems. 15 years.
- peanut-walrus 6mo ago
  I see no reason not to go with a rolling release distro for personal servers. Run all the services in containers and have the base OS auto-update itself as often as it needs. Went with openSUSE MicroOS myself, it updates and reboots almost daily so I can be pretty confident my server is healthy and it's atomic so if something does break and I don't feel like dealing with it, I can just click rollback button from cockpit and deal with it whenever I have time.
  - exyi 6mo ago
    Then you also have to auto-update the containers, if it's a public facing service. Either you'll have to build containers yourself or hope the developer pushes a new update whenever the base image has relevant security fixes.
    - peanut-walrus 6mo ago
      Yup, podman quadlets autoupdate quite nicely. Setting up a local registry mirror with ~3d delay before applying updates is on my todo list. My own service images already have a script that runs daily that pulls latest git updates and builds fresh images.
  - mx7zysuj4xew 6mo ago
    Everything you listed is the antithesis to managing and maintaining high availability systems
    - peanut-walrus 6mo ago
      It's your personal toy server, you are optimizing for something entirely different than high availability.
      - andix 6mo ago
        I have around 20 "personal toy servers". I really don't like to fix them all the time. Most of them are some small VMs or some Rasperry Pis controlling something. I want minimal changes on those systems, but still being able to update them.
- AltruisticGapHN 6mo ago
  I mean Ubuntu Pro is free for personal use and it extends the LTS support of 5 years so a total of 10 years afaik.
- itomato 6mo ago
  I don't have data, but my guess would be Debian or Slackware
  - andix 6mo ago
    No
  - luckied 6mo ago
    gentoo
rob 6mo ago
I've switched to Debian (and since Ubuntu) for my server needs but I remember being obsessed in the mid 2000s with FreeBSD when I was younger. I would spend more time configuring and setting them up than doing anything actually useful on them. It used to be hard to find dedicated servers or VPSs with any of the BSDs, I think I settled on Panix.com or something? Before that I remember some company called 15MinuteServers (NAC?) out of NJ I think that offered them. Just kind of rambling down memory lane at this point though.
- indigodaddy 6mo ago
  OVH has FreeBSD templates. And most KVM VM/VPS providers will allow console access and mount custom ISO to install whatever you want.
- Gud 6mo ago
  These days it’s fairly straightforward to install on my providers. I have FreeBSD with Hetzner and OVH. I’ve also used Vultr in the past.
Thaxll 6mo ago
The benchmarks are completely off, and a recent version of Ubuntu with sane config would easily beat Freebsd.
- vsgherzi 6mo ago
  My understanding is that the kernels are mostly equal. I’d be pretty surprised if one had a large impact one way or the other. Any differences I’d chalk up to the userspace program running it.
- MBCook 6mo ago
  Don’t forget there are serious hardware differences. It’s not apples to apples. But that’s ok. The author isn’t claiming FreeBSD is way better than Linux. It’s just a comparison of what he had vs what he has now.
- Gud 6mo ago
  Show me those benchmarks
  - nolist_policy 6mo ago
    From every benchmark I've seen so far, Linux has always been faster than the BSDs. For example, look at these benchmarks from 2003[1]. The newest benchmarks I could find[2], [3] point in the same direction. [1] http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/ http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/ [2] https://matteocroce.it/blog/freebsd_linux_networking/ https://matteocroce.it/blog/freebsd_linux_networking/ [3] https://www.phoronix.com/review/freebsd-15-amd-epyc-linux https://www.phoronix.com/review/freebsd-15-amd-epyc-linux
    - Gud 6mo ago
      The comment I replied to pointed out that the benchmarks were old, which I agree with. Both 1 and 2 are old and irrelevant, the 3rd has no clear winner?
coreyp_1 6mo ago
I'm in the same boat. I have 2 old servers that I let get "too" old, and now I'm afraid to touch them to update them. However, with some of the shenanigans that the Linux distributions are pulling around age verification/attestation, I'm considering bailing on them entirely. Note, I did try Artix, but when it broke last week after a restart (in which evidently something had gone wrong with an earlier kernel update), and I had to pull out a rescue ISO, I decided I didn't want to mess with that. I switched that machine to Devuan, but the jury is still out for me. I don't have any major complaints, but I'm still in the burn-in phase. :) I'm running Arch on a laptop, but they have been a bit hostile in the community with censorship, so I'm just waiting for a free weekend to blast it and put something else on. I don't want political drama in my software. This all comes at an interesting time, though. This is the first time that I purchased a new laptop and didn't even let it boot into Windows, but instantly installed Linux. And everything "just worked". And now that I'm excited to try Linux, so many of the big players are embracing the steps to erode privacy (AI everywhere... age attestation/verification... telemetry on by default...). It's sad, and I'm just going to "nope" out of any interactions with them.
- stock_toaster 6mo ago
  My servers/VMs typically run either FreeBSD or Alpine. A Debian here or there where needed (proxmox, VPS that doesn't support Alpine, corp stuff, etc). I've also got a couple of test systems running Chimera - going to wait until it hits stable before relying on it too much though. Experimenting a bit with AerynOS too.
- rlpb 6mo ago
  > However, with some of the shenanigans that the Linux distributions are pulling around age verification/attestation... You've been misled.
- sgc 6mo ago
  FWIW, I once abandoned an Ubuntu server for a decade, and managed to update it painlessly in 20 minutes. That same server is still running today, now with the latest LTS. I think I might have even started with Ubuntu 4, or perhaps 6, and it has been painless all the way through. Perhaps my slow upgrades saved me from early adopter woes :). I use Debian now much more. With all the supply chain attacks, Debian Stable feels like an absolute jewel, even if there are always a few packages I need to handle separately because I want or need a more updated version. But I love the old school no-nonsense engineering ethos.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
not_kurt_godel 6mo ago
Boggles my mind that people pay money to host hugo static sites on a VPS, which is objectively inferior and harder in every meaningful way compared to hosting for free on GitHub pages or S3+CloudFront.
- jvanderbot 6mo ago
  s3 + cloudfront takes approximately 2 extra steps every deploy, and about 10 extra steps that are easy to screw up at setup time. It's not a trivial drop-in, but yes, once it's done it's _really_ done.
  - not_kurt_godel 6mo ago
    You can make it zero deploy steps beyond git push with CodePipeline, and vibecoding makes the annoying config setup trivial if you know like 20% of what you're doing. There is really zero reason to be using a VPS for this unless you hate money, want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets.
    - shric 6mo ago
      > want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets. You can put it behind cloudflare for free.
      - not_kurt_godel 6mo ago
        You can put the whole thing on CloudFlare Pages for free too. Zero reason to pay for or deal with the complexity of an unnecessary VPS.
        shric 6mo ago
        Again “zero reason”. For some people it’s fun to have a VPS, that is a reason in and of itself.
kylec 6mo ago
I, too, have a server running 16.04 that I'm afraid to update. It currently has an uptime of 1281 days... at this point I'd feel bad rebooting it
- hdgvhicv 6mo ago
  My oldest server is on 8.04.
- nijave 6mo ago
  dd filesystem to another machine then boot it up with an emulator like qemu and do a trial run Be careful if you have anything that autostarts that reaches out
  - ThePowerOfFuet 6mo ago
    Genius.
- prmoustache 6mo ago
  What is there to be afraid of? Don't you have backups? Also, debian/ubuntu systems can easily be setup to auto update and reboot on a regular basis, leaving you manual maintenance only for the larger version upgrades.
  - account42 6mo ago
    Backups are not going to help if a reboot breaks something.
    - prmoustache 6mo ago
      Yes because you can always do a dusaster recovery by reinstalling and restoring data. A reboot doesn't break anything. Bugs do. Any time I had a regression after a kernel update on a linux distro I could boot it on a prior version from the grub menu. Any time I had a regression with a software package I could rollback to a prior version. Rolling back updates is a problem that has been solved for decades, at least on linux systems. The key with unattended upgrade is you want to have decent monitoring to make sure you never run out of disc space and do not figure it out weeks later if you have had an issue.
adamddev1 6mo ago
I enjoyed my foray into trying FreeBSD for my personal server. There's something cool, clean, simple and "punk rock" about it. But I gave up as my main pain points were: - PM2 was buggy on FreeBSD, which I used to manage my processes - An alternative, using `rc.d` to run daemons was just so hard to get logs working. - The firewall required too much self configuration to get it right with all the best security practices (ie. What does one do with ICMP.) I was missing something like a template with the defaults that come with UFW, for instance.
- gosub100 6mo ago
  My main pain points were that it doesn't survive power hits. If your power goes out, it will reboot and ask you to manually fsck the filesystem.
  - miguno 6mo ago
    You didn’t use ZFS with FreeBSD?
    - gosub100 6mo ago
      Now I do, but I built a few headless media servers for friends and was very disappointed when they stopped working after power outages.
- skydhash 6mo ago
  > - PM2 was buggy on FreeBSD, which I used to manage my processes For supervision? > - An alternative, using `rc.d` to run daemons was just so hard to get logs working. The unix way is to use logger(1) If you only want some simple message, or redirect to files using newsyslog(8) for managing the sizes of the files. > The firewall required too much self configuration to get it right with all the best security practices (ie. What does one do with ICMP.) I was missing something like a template with the defaults that come with UFW, for instance. I would recommend The Book of PF[0]. While FreeBSD has syntax difference with OpenBSD's pf, this should give you enough insight on how a firewall operates to get a sense of what rules to write. [0]: https://nostarch.com/book-of-pf-4e https://nostarch.com/book-of-pf-4e
bitbasher 6mo ago
I recently switched from Debian based servers to OpenBSD and I have never been happier. I wish I would have done it much, much earlier.
- pull_my_finger 6mo ago
  Can you detail the transition? What were the pain points? I feel like you lose a lot of the selling point of OpenBSD as soon as you start pulling from ports, but how could you do anything productive without it
  - tomth 6mo ago
    Ports are sometimes hardened as well, such as Firefox, Chromium, Got (OBSD git alternative, not yet part of base) etc... But I personally don't really use OpenBSD for security. Sure, good security is important, but for a simple person, I think any updated OS, with good passwords/pubkey auth, good config, being careful etc etc... Is good enough. OpenBSD is a coherent OS. It's simple (for geeks), and you can use it, by just using the documentation. There's no need for looking up tutorials really, because you don't have to read a 500 page book to understand certain tools, just basic man pages and some computer science knowledge. With OpenBSD, you go back to a simpler time. Without all the hectic bullshit and an ever-faster pace of constant changes that makes our lives worse, rather than better. The only useful thing it can't do is gaming - with some exceptions, for that I use Windows. Talking about ports again: OpenBSD comes with batteries included. Not everything though, but you don't really need the ports that much for just a server, if you aren't doing anything complex. I also use it on desktop/laptop systems, booting it up (yes, it's relatively slow...) always gets me to a state of tranquility. The good ol' days. Maybe that's just my type of brain, but life needs to become simpler again. Really, what post-2010 information technology has really improved our well-being? Can't think of much. OpenBSD may have to many rough edges for a desktop system though, even for most geeks. But for those, there is FreeBSD (have it on one laptop). Just get a well-supported machine for that.
tracker1 6mo ago
Personally, I've been running with Caddy in front of Docker (compose) for most of my personal/hobby usage. If it's a straight website, I'll let Caddy serve the contents directly... for "web apps" I'll pretty much containerize all the things and use caddy for TLS termination and reverse-proxy duties to the app running under Docker... Mostly ~/apps/appname, where each appname has a docker compose file, and the data directories mounted under appname... I can compose down and (s)ftp the data out for hard archives or to move a site/service. I had been running a few VMs under a dedicated server, but switched to separate VPSes on OVH. Only gotcha with OVH is if you want to run mail, you want to avoid the local zone VMs that don't allow mail hosting. YMMV
- stackghost 6mo ago
  This is more or less how I do it, too. Debating switching from Debian to something like Flatcar which is container-first with an immutable system/OS. I think FreeBSD has some interesting technical merits, but like it or not Docker is the default for a lot of open source software, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to translate everything to freebsd jails.
  - sally_glance 6mo ago
    I've had my private servers running Arch (managed by Ansible) for the last 5 years but have recently been looking into Talos for the same reasons. Setting up a single node k8s using Talos was actually pretty straight forward. In the end I decided against it just because I couldn't justify the continuous load caused by k8s components when my stuff is only sporadically in use... Instead I now have them on NixOS and I really enjoy the declarative approach (although the language annoys me).
- mikepurvis 6mo ago
  My home setup is kind of this but it's unraid running the containers and one of them is an nginx thingy specifically designed for reverse proxying other services.
- yard2010 6mo ago
  I have started using Traefik on one of my projects and it's a nice upgrade from nginx proxy manager. NPM is great, its web gui is noce, but with Traefik all I need to do is write what I want to happen in the docker compose file and that's it.
waynesonfire 6mo ago
I was running Ubuntu 16.04; migrated to FreeBSD and I'm all in. Between 16.04 and the current version of Linux; the ecosystem shifted. It's values shifted in ways that did not align with me. This mis-alignment is what motivated me to boot-up FreeBSD. I'm glad I discovered it. I found my happy place again. It's an incredible journey to take--whether you stick with it or not. Migrating to FreeBSD gives you new eyes into what Linux was, is, and the awesomeness of FreeBSD that is so hard to articulate; like describing the color blue. It must be taken as a whole to appreciate it; and I'm not just saying the OS, it's commands, kernel features, but, the end-to-end compute experience, over time. If I could draw an equivelent, it would be like when Djistrka savagely destroyed the GOTO statement with a single, short, paper. It took a brilliant mind to articulate that and there has yet to be such a mind to describe the beauty of FreeBSD. So, the best I can do, is just to challenge you to try it.
- bigfishrunning 6mo ago
  I've been running FreeBSD at home for a couple of years, and Linux at work (and at home) for 25 years. I'm interested to learn how the Linux ecosystem's values shifted. I figured out pretty early on that Ubuntu wasn't for me (now I usually run Debian, Slackware before that), and I'm wondering if the 'values' issues are Ubuntu specific or if they're some greater problem. I'm not trolling or defending Linux, I'm honestly just curious what you think.
arjie 6mo ago
The biggest mistake I made was high uptime. arjie.com was up for 10 years plus on a Hetzner VPS so that by the time they wanted to sunset the machine underlying I had no idea what my teenage self had set up. I have the backups but the site hasn’t been up in a decade… Nowadays I build things so that they move and I have moved things about a bit so I know they work.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- nine_k 6mo ago
  Indeed, for a VM, high uptime makes little sense, because a reboot takes a few seconds, and an upgrade requires no downtime, just switching the DNS to a new instance. For a physical machine which you can't easily copy, it's a different story.
  - mx7zysuj4xew 6mo ago
    We're talking what, 15 minutes to reach post?
- bfivyvysj 6mo ago
  I started putting things in a big ansible playbook repo. Don't need to have it fully managed by ansible either I mostly just have setup configured there I still do lots of by hand management.
  - arjie 6mo ago
    I have the same. The infra management is in one place, the apps hold their own, and there’s a docs folder on the server where each guy puts his stuff. The install is idempotent deploy scripts. But back then my stuff was more ramshackle.
- gerdesj 6mo ago
  "The biggest mistake I made was high uptime" Quite. I'm old enough to remember machine uptime being a badge of honour. However, being older and not really wiser, I look for service uptime these days. Yes we did have similar back in the day, that's why MX and the like DNS records exist. Old school clusters were pretty esoteric but the lessons were learned (split brain n that) and that's why we still argue the toss with kiddies about why a Proxmox cluster with two nodes is fucked and why we recommend an additional "witness". I don't care that VMware glossed over the whole two node HA cluster thing years ago with a massive bodge. They were wrong then and they are probably still wrong because that nonsense is probably still baked in. Sorry, slight digression. High uptime implies no patching. We all love patching.
stldev 6mo ago
The first time someone explained Docker to me I remember saying, "Oh, you mean a jail?". Not quite, as the article explains. :) kqueue was a huge win too. A huge thank you to the FreeBSD developers. I ran my first company for 15 years on FreeBSD with incredible uptime and resilience.
- huflungdung 6mo ago
  [dead]
h4kunamata 6mo ago
All my homelab stuff runs on Proxmox LXC container and fully managed via Ansible non-destructive playbooks. I just setup Semaphore the other night which adds a web UI to manage Ansible playbooks, it works like this: 1. I host my own Forgejo git repos 2. Semaphore is granted access to the Ansible repo 3. FreshRSS notifies me when a service I am running has new release 4. Check the release note, then run Semaphore to run the ansible-playbook I could fully automate it all but I have the need to read release notes. As for the OS, they are Debian 13 Netinst and fully local only, I could run them until the services can no longer run, which the ansible-playbook can spin up another LXC container running Debian 14 or whatever. The goal is to automate everything as much as possible.
foxfired 6mo ago
Ha! Mine ran on 18.04 [0] and I migrated it a couple months ago. When I went to take a screenshot for bragging rights, I noticed two other servers 16.10 and 15.04 The applications run just fine, but I don't even know where to start. Apparently I coded them directly into the server, no dev machine! [0]: https://cdn.idiallo.com/images/assets/daily/98/old_servers.jpg https://cdn.idiallo.com/images/assets/daily/98/old_servers.j...
moparts 6mo ago
[dead]
https443 6mo ago
> In the end, this is all useless, since most of my traffic comes from AI systems crawling it anyway…
someotherperson 6mo ago
Oh wow. I did the same thing a couple of weeks ago. The server hadn't been updated since ~2015, running a blog on Ghost from that time with node 0.10 installed. I was a bit rougher though: I just took a backup, then let my Hermes agent (Gemini 3.1 Pro) loose on it. It upgraded everything that needed to be upgraded, patched what needed to be patched, then proceeded to migrate everything to it's most recent equivalents. After that, a fair bit of server hardening was carried out followed by debloating of unused services. Likely would have continued to procrastinate doing this if it wasn't for AI support.
- Gigachad 6mo ago
  I mean you can update trivially without AI. The problem is the risk of breaking something, which the backup mitigates.
tyiz 6mo ago
[dead]
febusravenga 6mo ago
> hostname: tauceti The other Hail Mary reference is on top of HN today. Well done Andy Weir.
- jetbalsa 6mo ago
  I've had a "Get in loser, we are going to Tau Ceti" on my car's bumper ever since the book came out
igoose1 6mo ago
> I don’t know why fastfetch always report more memory being used than the actual values. I’ve never seen more than 3GiB used in btop for this server Probably, it's because of ZFS ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache). It's similar to Linux's page cache, can be claimed back any moment and different tools name it differently: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/ https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
rawoke083600 6mo ago
Brillant post ! I love Hetzner's cloud UI. Happy customer for many many years with them.
DeathArrow 6mo ago
I was pretty excited to find out that FreeBSD now supports Podman and OCI containers so now I can move some of my web apps from Linux to FreeBSD. :)
canada_dry 6mo ago
FreeBSD uses ZFS. I've been using ZFS for about a decade on several systems and can't say enough good things about it: rock solid, feature rich and easy to use are the top benefits. It really needs more love!
- mesrik 6mo ago
  And it's been used by many commercial networking and storage appliances too. Juniper using various devices (routers, firewalls, switches, etc), Citrix Netscreen load balancers, Dell storage Isilon just to name few. Knowing FreeBSD pays dividends if you work enterprise gear. Makes your life so much easier even there is vendor specific UI's and shell, but you know your way around so much better when you encounter any issues which requires using shell and it helps you debugging things you would otherwise not being able to accomplish. Knowing you way around *BSD how check things, mount a USD drive, collect data & or evidence when need arises is well worth having beyond just surviving bare Linux skills. BSD's are alive and kicking on commercial appliances and devices.
warumdarum 6mo ago
Ubuntu has no ui vision besides we wanna be: Sleek like apple Discoverable like android Worksuitable like windows Our usp is:?

374 points by speckx 6mo ago

> I don’t know why fastfetch always report more memory being used than the actual values. I’ve never seen more than 3GiB used in btop for this server My guess would be that fastfetch probably reports actual memory usage while btop probably reports the total usage of all processes. The former is probably higher because of things like filesystem caching

lnenad 6mo ago

I love people that aren't afraid to experiment and learn. As someone that hasn't had a formal education in software engineering (just in other kind of engineering) I learned the most by doing and failing.

elevation 6mo ago
Formal education doesn't typically emphasize this kind of learning. Univerity CS classes will focus on data structures, algorithms, languages, turing machines and finite automata and how they relate to computability. If you're a university student and want to learn OpenBSD administration or how to host your own blog, or just how to use VSCode, these are all extracurriculars.

andix 6mo ago

Slightly off topic: What's currently the free Linux distribution with the longest support cycle? For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because it got security updates for a really long time. With minimal risk of breaking things on updates. PS: after a bit of research Alma/Rocky Linux are probably the best choices for now. 10 years of support. But are they maintained well?

KennyBlanken 6mo ago
Probably Debian or Ubuntu. The question is...why do you care that much? I've upgraded Debian stable (both pure and with some cherry-picked backports) and Ubuntu (non-LTS and LTS) systems in place and rarely broken anything, for years and years. When stuff has broken it's been a quick google and then slapping myself for not having read the upgrade guide. I do generally wait about 2-3 weeks before upgrading, giving time for them to catch stuff that was missed until the great masses were set loose on it.
- andix 6mo ago
  > why do you care that much? I've had issues with Ubuntu/Debian upgrades more than once. Some third party binaries breaking with the update. Or some specific config tweaks that break, because the structure of /etc changed too much. For some small VM with a specific purpose I prefer a distribution that changes as little as possible for as long as possible. Less work, more uptime.
  - irishcoffee 6mo ago
    I won't touch ubuntu unless forced to by some obscure work requirement. I've had enough bad experiences with repos being shut down, updates/upgrades breaking unanticipated, obscure things, and I hate snap. The naming conventions drive me crazy as well. When you deal with 2 things that have dumbshit naming conventions, like ubuntu and ROS, its really obnoxious to pretend to case enough to keep track of.
- nightfly 6mo ago
  > The question is...why do you care that much? Not the OP, but I support Ubuntu as desktop and server OS for an engineering collage and have for 10ish years. Some LTS upgrades don't require many changes (mostly minor package name changes) and some take months of work to get rolled out (mostly for workstations, the server upgrades are usually quick.). Not everything gets upgraded every new OS release. If we had to upgrade everything every 6-12 months it would eat up a significant amount of time for our small team.
  - 6mo ago
secabeen 6mo ago
Alma and Rocky if you want fully free or have a lot of machines. RHEL if you are okay with registering with them; they give ten machines free access to their updates for each Registered account in their system. RHEL is definitely the most stable major distribution. Alma and Rocky are essentially downstream clones of RHEL.
pm2222 6mo ago
Use a rolling release like Arch and it’s supported forever.
- andix 6mo ago
  I need to enable automatic updates, because I don't have the time to manually update. I have a few machines on Open SuSE Tubleweed, and stuff just randomly breaks. A few months ago there was a weird Kernel bug that just froze all of them. They update and reboot every day, and suddenly it all worked well again. A bit too exciting for me :)
  - delicious_apple 6mo ago
    You can always try openSUSE Slowroll (in beta), which is a rolling release that updates less frequently than Tumbleweed. It advertises better stability. https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Slowroll https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Slowroll
- wolvoleo 6mo ago
  But then you have constant maintenance. I prefer rolling distros, don't get me wrong. But it does mean you will get the latest of every package constantly and some cause problems. For a box that sits in a corner doing its joband you don't want to pay attention to it's not a good choice IMO. On a desktop you want the latest of everything on and you have time to keep up it's the best.
  - computerfriend 6mo ago
    I have an Arch server that has been online for ten years (yikes), never had any issues with it.
    - TylerE 6mo ago
      > never had any issues with it. You've never NOTICED any issues. Which is far from the same claim...
mhitza 6mo ago
> But are they maintained well? Alma has a few affordances as it's no longer RHEL source compatible, which means it could ship priviledge escalation fixes with new kernel updates faster. Rocky responded with an extra, optional to enable, security repo to provide mitigations to the exploits while waiting for RHEL to downstream. Look pretty well maintained to me. If only judging by recent events.
- gh02t 6mo ago
  Rocky's docs are also really nice. They aren't as thorough as RedHat's, but they're much more readable and concise, and tend to be written for a less enterprise-y audience.
  - mhitza 6mo ago
    Don't even remind me about the RedHat docs, lol. Their solutions pages used to be readable with an account, now I think you need a subscription too. The manuals, indeed are good, though for more esoteric issues I land too often on a gated answer page.
    - doubled112 6mo ago
      You can use the free developer subscription for documentation even if you don't plan to use your 16 RHEL licenses.
    - infinet 6mo ago
      Content wise the RedHat docs are great, but navigating the doc has a wired feeling that is hard to describe. Everything is black and white, the page has low information density perhaps because of the line space or paragraph space; the typesetting of command line and configure examples is not clear separated from surrounding text; mouse cannot select text of the command line examples; the page top is distracting because it keeps showing and disappearing as mouse scrolls up and down. Somehow the left navigation pane is also difficult to follow, easy to get lost when trying to find a section.
- andix 6mo ago
BadBadJellyBean 6mo ago
You are betting that whatever you host doesn't live as long as the upgrade cycle because it'll probably be a pain when the upgrades finally arrive. I'd rather have smaller version jumps more often than a huge jump with everything changing after a long time.
- andix 6mo ago
  It usually doesn't live until the end of the support cycle. And if it does I will probably migrate it to a fresh VM instead of upgrading the distribution.
  - 6031769 6mo ago
    Completely agree. A fresh install beats an in-place major version upgrade every time. Less hazardous and gives an easy path to clear out all the accumulated crud.
  - BadBadJellyBean 6mo ago
    I'm not worried about upgrading. I'm worried about the whole environment being potentially several versions newer than the old one. All shared libraries. All services. Everything new. And now you have to make a software that has had little upgrades run on that. Have fun.
tannhaeuser 6mo ago
Debian LTS/extended LTS
- andix 6mo ago
  5 years is not a lot. It releases every 2 years, so it requires upgrading at least every 4 years. In the worst case it's just 3 years of support, if you install right before the next release. ELTS is 10 years and paid. It's great that it exists, but not relevant for my toy projects.
  - WJW 6mo ago
    So there is a project that you care enough about to keep it alive, but 1-2 hours every FOUR YEARS is too much? At some point I just have to call you lazy dude. Either the 1-2 hours is a drop in the bucket compared to what you spend on it anyway (like a blog you still regularly update), or you don't actively update the project but still care enough about it to spend half an evening every few years, or you should just admit you don't care about it enough anymore to do even that. In the last case just delete the project.
    - andix 6mo ago
      Yes, I'm lazy. And that's fine.
    - cocoto 6mo ago
      It can be way more than 2 hours depending on the project.
    - com2kid 6mo ago
      > So there is a project that you care enough about to keep it alive, but 1-2 hours every FOUR YEARS is too much? At some point I just have to call you lazy dude. I want the machine that serves my static blog pages to have, ideally, 0 maintenance. It needs to do one thing, serve some static HTTP pages and have new pages pushed to it. Quite frankly I wish some of those "minimal docker first OSs" had taken off.
nextos 6mo ago
I would say NixOS, where it is trivial to switch across releases, run software from different releases, and perform rollbacks. I have been running NixOS on several servers for more than a decade. No reinstalling, upgrading, or any breaks whatsoever.
- indemnity 6mo ago
  I run nixOS as well on my home infrastructure (gateway/firewall, a couple of internal servers). But I have had, uh, non-trivial breakages happen also when I upgrade the system itself to the next yearly release. Non-bootable kernel kind of breakages. But I will give you that I can just boot from the generation before the upgrade, and it works again. So there's that :)
- tombert 6mo ago
  I've only been running NixOS (in any serious capacity) for three years, but I have installed it on every computer that I am allowed to install it on now. It has been the most headache-free Linux I've used, simply because I'm less scared to play with and fix stuff. The fact that rollbacks are trivial and snapshots are automatic, and since everything is declarative in a text file anyway, I am way braver. If I do something like screw up the video driver, or the wifi driver or make it so the system doesn't boot anymore, all I need to do is reboot and choose a previous generation.
  - andix 6mo ago
    > simply because I'm less scared to play with and fix stuff. The main reason of a LTS distribution is not having to play around and fix stuff. Install something once, and it keeps running without any changes, but still gets security updates.
    - tombert 6mo ago
      Yeah, but I find that particularly with laptops, even with LTS releases, there's almost always something you need to fix. For example, there's a weird quirk with my laptop that if I am using a USB keyboard and stop typing for more than a minute, it "powers down", and if when I start typing again it misses the first four or five characters, which is very annoying. The solution involved putting a few boot parameters and then it works fine and as expected, but I would be reluctant to do that with Ubuntu or really any non-NixOS distro, because if I screw up a boot param I get into a situation where the computer won't, you know, boot, meaning I'm stuck screwing around with grub commands and trying to fix things, which is annoying. With NixOS, if I screw things up it's like a minute of rebooting and choosing the old generation. Not to mention that if you have a non-declarative OS, it can be hard to know what exactly is on the computer. When I ran an Ubuntu LTS server, I eventually had installed dozens of packages that I don't think were being used but it was hard to know for sure which ones were necessary and which ones weren't. When I'm using NixOS all the packages are unambiguously in the configuration.nix. "Uninstalling" a program (including its transitive dependencies) is just removing that package out of the configuration.nix and rebuilding. I have nothing against LTS releases, but I do think that at least for laptops (which can have kind of arcane hardware quirks) it's better to use NixOS.
ezst 6mo ago
For a while (a decade+), I was running CentOS on my servers on the same assumption of long time stability and ensuing peace of mind. Then I figured that over such durations, the ecosystem drift becomes significant and keeping applications up to date and running on top of the OS becomes an increasing challenge (with the more "infrastructure" packages like glibc, python/Apache combos, GCC, ... slowly becoming incompatible with the latest applicative stack). Then I figured that version upgrades were miserable, not just because I had painted myself in a weird corner with ungodly packages mix-ups, but because the upgrade path was always best-effort. I think I gave up during the 6 to 7 transition, as I realised that all I needed was fedora: with yearly or half-yearly updates I have no need to fight the distro's packages: stuff stays current and in working order, major distro upgrades go smoothly, downtime is minimal. I'm not considering going back to any "server distribution" ever.
- andix 6mo ago
  > slowly becoming incompatible with the latest applicative stack LTS distributions are great if your applications don't change (much), or are explicitly compatible with the specific distribution you run them on.
pull_my_finger 6mo ago
[dead]
Tepix 6mo ago
Ubuntu Pro is free for up to 5 systems. 15 years.
peanut-walrus 6mo ago
I see no reason not to go with a rolling release distro for personal servers. Run all the services in containers and have the base OS auto-update itself as often as it needs. Went with openSUSE MicroOS myself, it updates and reboots almost daily so I can be pretty confident my server is healthy and it's atomic so if something does break and I don't feel like dealing with it, I can just click rollback button from cockpit and deal with it whenever I have time.
- exyi 6mo ago
  Then you also have to auto-update the containers, if it's a public facing service. Either you'll have to build containers yourself or hope the developer pushes a new update whenever the base image has relevant security fixes.
  - peanut-walrus 6mo ago
    Yup, podman quadlets autoupdate quite nicely. Setting up a local registry mirror with ~3d delay before applying updates is on my todo list. My own service images already have a script that runs daily that pulls latest git updates and builds fresh images.
- mx7zysuj4xew 6mo ago
  Everything you listed is the antithesis to managing and maintaining high availability systems
  - peanut-walrus 6mo ago
    It's your personal toy server, you are optimizing for something entirely different than high availability.
    - andix 6mo ago
      I have around 20 "personal toy servers". I really don't like to fix them all the time. Most of them are some small VMs or some Rasperry Pis controlling something. I want minimal changes on those systems, but still being able to update them.
AltruisticGapHN 6mo ago
I mean Ubuntu Pro is free for personal use and it extends the LTS support of 5 years so a total of 10 years afaik.
itomato 6mo ago
I don't have data, but my guess would be Debian or Slackware
- andix 6mo ago
  No
- luckied 6mo ago
  gentoo

rob 6mo ago

I've switched to Debian (and since Ubuntu) for my server needs but I remember being obsessed in the mid 2000s with FreeBSD when I was younger. I would spend more time configuring and setting them up than doing anything actually useful on them. It used to be hard to find dedicated servers or VPSs with any of the BSDs, I think I settled on Panix.com or something? Before that I remember some company called 15MinuteServers (NAC?) out of NJ I think that offered them. Just kind of rambling down memory lane at this point though.

indigodaddy 6mo ago
OVH has FreeBSD templates. And most KVM VM/VPS providers will allow console access and mount custom ISO to install whatever you want.
Gud 6mo ago
These days it’s fairly straightforward to install on my providers. I have FreeBSD with Hetzner and OVH. I’ve also used Vultr in the past.

Thaxll 6mo ago

The benchmarks are completely off, and a recent version of Ubuntu with sane config would easily beat Freebsd.

vsgherzi 6mo ago
My understanding is that the kernels are mostly equal. I’d be pretty surprised if one had a large impact one way or the other. Any differences I’d chalk up to the userspace program running it.
MBCook 6mo ago
Don’t forget there are serious hardware differences. It’s not apples to apples. But that’s ok. The author isn’t claiming FreeBSD is way better than Linux. It’s just a comparison of what he had vs what he has now.
Gud 6mo ago
Show me those benchmarks
- nolist_policy 6mo ago
  From every benchmark I've seen so far, Linux has always been faster than the BSDs. For example, look at these benchmarks from 2003[1]. The newest benchmarks I could find[2], [3] point in the same direction. [1] http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/ http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/ [2] https://matteocroce.it/blog/freebsd_linux_networking/ https://matteocroce.it/blog/freebsd_linux_networking/ [3] https://www.phoronix.com/review/freebsd-15-amd-epyc-linux https://www.phoronix.com/review/freebsd-15-amd-epyc-linux
  - Gud 6mo ago
    The comment I replied to pointed out that the benchmarks were old, which I agree with. Both 1 and 2 are old and irrelevant, the 3rd has no clear winner?

coreyp_1 6mo ago

I'm in the same boat. I have 2 old servers that I let get "too" old, and now I'm afraid to touch them to update them. However, with some of the shenanigans that the Linux distributions are pulling around age verification/attestation, I'm considering bailing on them entirely. Note, I did try Artix, but when it broke last week after a restart (in which evidently something had gone wrong with an earlier kernel update), and I had to pull out a rescue ISO, I decided I didn't want to mess with that. I switched that machine to Devuan, but the jury is still out for me. I don't have any major complaints, but I'm still in the burn-in phase. :) I'm running Arch on a laptop, but they have been a bit hostile in the community with censorship, so I'm just waiting for a free weekend to blast it and put something else on. I don't want political drama in my software. This all comes at an interesting time, though. This is the first time that I purchased a new laptop and didn't even let it boot into Windows, but instantly installed Linux. And everything "just worked". And now that I'm excited to try Linux, so many of the big players are embracing the steps to erode privacy (AI everywhere... age attestation/verification... telemetry on by default...). It's sad, and I'm just going to "nope" out of any interactions with them.

stock_toaster 6mo ago
My servers/VMs typically run either FreeBSD or Alpine. A Debian here or there where needed (proxmox, VPS that doesn't support Alpine, corp stuff, etc). I've also got a couple of test systems running Chimera - going to wait until it hits stable before relying on it too much though. Experimenting a bit with AerynOS too.
rlpb 6mo ago
> However, with some of the shenanigans that the Linux distributions are pulling around age verification/attestation... You've been misled.
sgc 6mo ago
FWIW, I once abandoned an Ubuntu server for a decade, and managed to update it painlessly in 20 minutes. That same server is still running today, now with the latest LTS. I think I might have even started with Ubuntu 4, or perhaps 6, and it has been painless all the way through. Perhaps my slow upgrades saved me from early adopter woes :). I use Debian now much more. With all the supply chain attacks, Debian Stable feels like an absolute jewel, even if there are always a few packages I need to handle separately because I want or need a more updated version. But I love the old school no-nonsense engineering ethos.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

not_kurt_godel 6mo ago

Boggles my mind that people pay money to host hugo static sites on a VPS, which is objectively inferior and harder in every meaningful way compared to hosting for free on GitHub pages or S3+CloudFront.

jvanderbot 6mo ago
s3 + cloudfront takes approximately 2 extra steps every deploy, and about 10 extra steps that are easy to screw up at setup time. It's not a trivial drop-in, but yes, once it's done it's _really_ done.
- not_kurt_godel 6mo ago
  You can make it zero deploy steps beyond git push with CodePipeline, and vibecoding makes the annoying config setup trivial if you know like 20% of what you're doing. There is really zero reason to be using a VPS for this unless you hate money, want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets.
  - shric 6mo ago
    > want your site to choke during once-in-lifetime opportunities to go life-changingly viral, and like contributing to the global population malicious botnets. You can put it behind cloudflare for free.
    - not_kurt_godel 6mo ago
      You can put the whole thing on CloudFlare Pages for free too. Zero reason to pay for or deal with the complexity of an unnecessary VPS.
      - shric 6mo ago
        Again “zero reason”. For some people it’s fun to have a VPS, that is a reason in and of itself.

kylec 6mo ago

I, too, have a server running 16.04 that I'm afraid to update. It currently has an uptime of 1281 days... at this point I'd feel bad rebooting it

hdgvhicv 6mo ago
My oldest server is on 8.04.
nijave 6mo ago
dd filesystem to another machine then boot it up with an emulator like qemu and do a trial run Be careful if you have anything that autostarts that reaches out
- ThePowerOfFuet 6mo ago
  Genius.
prmoustache 6mo ago
What is there to be afraid of? Don't you have backups? Also, debian/ubuntu systems can easily be setup to auto update and reboot on a regular basis, leaving you manual maintenance only for the larger version upgrades.
- account42 6mo ago
  Backups are not going to help if a reboot breaks something.
  - prmoustache 6mo ago
    Yes because you can always do a dusaster recovery by reinstalling and restoring data. A reboot doesn't break anything. Bugs do. Any time I had a regression after a kernel update on a linux distro I could boot it on a prior version from the grub menu. Any time I had a regression with a software package I could rollback to a prior version. Rolling back updates is a problem that has been solved for decades, at least on linux systems. The key with unattended upgrade is you want to have decent monitoring to make sure you never run out of disc space and do not figure it out weeks later if you have had an issue.

adamddev1 6mo ago

I enjoyed my foray into trying FreeBSD for my personal server. There's something cool, clean, simple and "punk rock" about it. But I gave up as my main pain points were: - PM2 was buggy on FreeBSD, which I used to manage my processes - An alternative, using `rc.d` to run daemons was just so hard to get logs working. - The firewall required too much self configuration to get it right with all the best security practices (ie. What does one do with ICMP.) I was missing something like a template with the defaults that come with UFW, for instance.

gosub100 6mo ago
My main pain points were that it doesn't survive power hits. If your power goes out, it will reboot and ask you to manually fsck the filesystem.
- miguno 6mo ago
  You didn’t use ZFS with FreeBSD?
  - gosub100 6mo ago
    Now I do, but I built a few headless media servers for friends and was very disappointed when they stopped working after power outages.
skydhash 6mo ago
> - PM2 was buggy on FreeBSD, which I used to manage my processes For supervision? > - An alternative, using `rc.d` to run daemons was just so hard to get logs working. The unix way is to use logger(1) If you only want some simple message, or redirect to files using newsyslog(8) for managing the sizes of the files. > The firewall required too much self configuration to get it right with all the best security practices (ie. What does one do with ICMP.) I was missing something like a template with the defaults that come with UFW, for instance. I would recommend The Book of PF[0]. While FreeBSD has syntax difference with OpenBSD's pf, this should give you enough insight on how a firewall operates to get a sense of what rules to write. [0]: https://nostarch.com/book-of-pf-4e https://nostarch.com/book-of-pf-4e

bitbasher 6mo ago

I recently switched from Debian based servers to OpenBSD and I have never been happier. I wish I would have done it much, much earlier.

pull_my_finger 6mo ago
Can you detail the transition? What were the pain points? I feel like you lose a lot of the selling point of OpenBSD as soon as you start pulling from ports, but how could you do anything productive without it
- tomth 6mo ago
  Ports are sometimes hardened as well, such as Firefox, Chromium, Got (OBSD git alternative, not yet part of base) etc... But I personally don't really use OpenBSD for security. Sure, good security is important, but for a simple person, I think any updated OS, with good passwords/pubkey auth, good config, being careful etc etc... Is good enough. OpenBSD is a coherent OS. It's simple (for geeks), and you can use it, by just using the documentation. There's no need for looking up tutorials really, because you don't have to read a 500 page book to understand certain tools, just basic man pages and some computer science knowledge. With OpenBSD, you go back to a simpler time. Without all the hectic bullshit and an ever-faster pace of constant changes that makes our lives worse, rather than better. The only useful thing it can't do is gaming - with some exceptions, for that I use Windows. Talking about ports again: OpenBSD comes with batteries included. Not everything though, but you don't really need the ports that much for just a server, if you aren't doing anything complex. I also use it on desktop/laptop systems, booting it up (yes, it's relatively slow...) always gets me to a state of tranquility. The good ol' days. Maybe that's just my type of brain, but life needs to become simpler again. Really, what post-2010 information technology has really improved our well-being? Can't think of much. OpenBSD may have to many rough edges for a desktop system though, even for most geeks. But for those, there is FreeBSD (have it on one laptop). Just get a well-supported machine for that.

tracker1 6mo ago

Personally, I've been running with Caddy in front of Docker (compose) for most of my personal/hobby usage. If it's a straight website, I'll let Caddy serve the contents directly... for "web apps" I'll pretty much containerize all the things and use caddy for TLS termination and reverse-proxy duties to the app running under Docker... Mostly ~/apps/appname, where each appname has a docker compose file, and the data directories mounted under appname... I can compose down and (s)ftp the data out for hard archives or to move a site/service. I had been running a few VMs under a dedicated server, but switched to separate VPSes on OVH. Only gotcha with OVH is if you want to run mail, you want to avoid the local zone VMs that don't allow mail hosting. YMMV

stackghost 6mo ago
This is more or less how I do it, too. Debating switching from Debian to something like Flatcar which is container-first with an immutable system/OS. I think FreeBSD has some interesting technical merits, but like it or not Docker is the default for a lot of open source software, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to translate everything to freebsd jails.
- sally_glance 6mo ago
  I've had my private servers running Arch (managed by Ansible) for the last 5 years but have recently been looking into Talos for the same reasons. Setting up a single node k8s using Talos was actually pretty straight forward. In the end I decided against it just because I couldn't justify the continuous load caused by k8s components when my stuff is only sporadically in use... Instead I now have them on NixOS and I really enjoy the declarative approach (although the language annoys me).
mikepurvis 6mo ago
My home setup is kind of this but it's unraid running the containers and one of them is an nginx thingy specifically designed for reverse proxying other services.
yard2010 6mo ago
I have started using Traefik on one of my projects and it's a nice upgrade from nginx proxy manager. NPM is great, its web gui is noce, but with Traefik all I need to do is write what I want to happen in the docker compose file and that's it.

waynesonfire 6mo ago

I was running Ubuntu 16.04; migrated to FreeBSD and I'm all in. Between 16.04 and the current version of Linux; the ecosystem shifted. It's values shifted in ways that did not align with me. This mis-alignment is what motivated me to boot-up FreeBSD. I'm glad I discovered it. I found my happy place again. It's an incredible journey to take--whether you stick with it or not. Migrating to FreeBSD gives you new eyes into what Linux was, is, and the awesomeness of FreeBSD that is so hard to articulate; like describing the color blue. It must be taken as a whole to appreciate it; and I'm not just saying the OS, it's commands, kernel features, but, the end-to-end compute experience, over time. If I could draw an equivelent, it would be like when Djistrka savagely destroyed the GOTO statement with a single, short, paper. It took a brilliant mind to articulate that and there has yet to be such a mind to describe the beauty of FreeBSD. So, the best I can do, is just to challenge you to try it.

bigfishrunning 6mo ago
I've been running FreeBSD at home for a couple of years, and Linux at work (and at home) for 25 years. I'm interested to learn how the Linux ecosystem's values shifted. I figured out pretty early on that Ubuntu wasn't for me (now I usually run Debian, Slackware before that), and I'm wondering if the 'values' issues are Ubuntu specific or if they're some greater problem. I'm not trolling or defending Linux, I'm honestly just curious what you think.

arjie 6mo ago

The biggest mistake I made was high uptime. arjie.com was up for 10 years plus on a Hetzner VPS so that by the time they wanted to sunset the machine underlying I had no idea what my teenage self had set up. I have the backups but the site hasn’t been up in a decade… Nowadays I build things so that they move and I have moved things about a bit so I know they work.

deleted 6mo ago
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nine_k 6mo ago
Indeed, for a VM, high uptime makes little sense, because a reboot takes a few seconds, and an upgrade requires no downtime, just switching the DNS to a new instance. For a physical machine which you can't easily copy, it's a different story.
- mx7zysuj4xew 6mo ago
  We're talking what, 15 minutes to reach post?
bfivyvysj 6mo ago
I started putting things in a big ansible playbook repo. Don't need to have it fully managed by ansible either I mostly just have setup configured there I still do lots of by hand management.
- arjie 6mo ago
  I have the same. The infra management is in one place, the apps hold their own, and there’s a docs folder on the server where each guy puts his stuff. The install is idempotent deploy scripts. But back then my stuff was more ramshackle.
gerdesj 6mo ago
"The biggest mistake I made was high uptime" Quite. I'm old enough to remember machine uptime being a badge of honour. However, being older and not really wiser, I look for service uptime these days. Yes we did have similar back in the day, that's why MX and the like DNS records exist. Old school clusters were pretty esoteric but the lessons were learned (split brain n that) and that's why we still argue the toss with kiddies about why a Proxmox cluster with two nodes is fucked and why we recommend an additional "witness". I don't care that VMware glossed over the whole two node HA cluster thing years ago with a massive bodge. They were wrong then and they are probably still wrong because that nonsense is probably still baked in. Sorry, slight digression. High uptime implies no patching. We all love patching.

stldev 6mo ago

The first time someone explained Docker to me I remember saying, "Oh, you mean a jail?". Not quite, as the article explains. :) kqueue was a huge win too. A huge thank you to the FreeBSD developers. I ran my first company for 15 years on FreeBSD with incredible uptime and resilience.

huflungdung 6mo ago
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h4kunamata 6mo ago

All my homelab stuff runs on Proxmox LXC container and fully managed via Ansible non-destructive playbooks. I just setup Semaphore the other night which adds a web UI to manage Ansible playbooks, it works like this: 1. I host my own Forgejo git repos 2. Semaphore is granted access to the Ansible repo 3. FreshRSS notifies me when a service I am running has new release 4. Check the release note, then run Semaphore to run the ansible-playbook I could fully automate it all but I have the need to read release notes. As for the OS, they are Debian 13 Netinst and fully local only, I could run them until the services can no longer run, which the ansible-playbook can spin up another LXC container running Debian 14 or whatever. The goal is to automate everything as much as possible.

foxfired 6mo ago

Ha! Mine ran on 18.04 [0] and I migrated it a couple months ago. When I went to take a screenshot for bragging rights, I noticed two other servers 16.10 and 15.04 The applications run just fine, but I don't even know where to start. Apparently I coded them directly into the server, no dev machine! [0]: https://cdn.idiallo.com/images/assets/daily/98/old_servers.jpg https://cdn.idiallo.com/images/assets/daily/98/old_servers.j...

moparts 6mo ago

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https443 6mo ago

> In the end, this is all useless, since most of my traffic comes from AI systems crawling it anyway…

someotherperson 6mo ago

Oh wow. I did the same thing a couple of weeks ago. The server hadn't been updated since ~2015, running a blog on Ghost from that time with node 0.10 installed. I was a bit rougher though: I just took a backup, then let my Hermes agent (Gemini 3.1 Pro) loose on it. It upgraded everything that needed to be upgraded, patched what needed to be patched, then proceeded to migrate everything to it's most recent equivalents. After that, a fair bit of server hardening was carried out followed by debloating of unused services. Likely would have continued to procrastinate doing this if it wasn't for AI support.

Gigachad 6mo ago
I mean you can update trivially without AI. The problem is the risk of breaking something, which the backup mitigates.

tyiz 6mo ago

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febusravenga 6mo ago

> hostname: tauceti The other Hail Mary reference is on top of HN today. Well done Andy Weir.

jetbalsa 6mo ago
I've had a "Get in loser, we are going to Tau Ceti" on my car's bumper ever since the book came out

igoose1 6mo ago

> I don’t know why fastfetch always report more memory being used than the actual values. I’ve never seen more than 3GiB used in btop for this server Probably, it's because of ZFS ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache). It's similar to Linux's page cache, can be claimed back any moment and different tools name it differently: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/ https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

rawoke083600 6mo ago

Brillant post ! I love Hetzner's cloud UI. Happy customer for many many years with them.

DeathArrow 6mo ago

I was pretty excited to find out that FreeBSD now supports Podman and OCI containers so now I can move some of my web apps from Linux to FreeBSD. :)

canada_dry 6mo ago

FreeBSD uses ZFS. I've been using ZFS for about a decade on several systems and can't say enough good things about it: rock solid, feature rich and easy to use are the top benefits. It really needs more love!

mesrik 6mo ago
And it's been used by many commercial networking and storage appliances too. Juniper using various devices (routers, firewalls, switches, etc), Citrix Netscreen load balancers, Dell storage Isilon just to name few. Knowing FreeBSD pays dividends if you work enterprise gear. Makes your life so much easier even there is vendor specific UI's and shell, but you know your way around so much better when you encounter any issues which requires using shell and it helps you debugging things you would otherwise not being able to accomplish. Knowing you way around *BSD how check things, mount a USD drive, collect data & or evidence when need arises is well worth having beyond just surviving bare Linux skills. BSD's are alive and kicking on commercial appliances and devices.

warumdarum 6mo ago

Ubuntu has no ui vision besides we wanna be: Sleek like apple Discoverable like android Worksuitable like windows Our usp is:?