Farewell FreeBSD!

da1 said:
Good luck with that.
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Yeah, it's a crime.:( No crypto is a deal breaker for me. I'll be sticking with good old UFS2, I just need a way to ensure data integrity.
 
Oracle is a good example of a company stuck in the way of thinking of the 1980s and 1990s where software was seen as the hot product that was your main cash cow by licensing it to interested parties with NDAs etc. for good money. Now this kind of thinking doesn't work anymore because nobody is willing to pay for just software because of competing free altenatives that many times outperform the original. A piece of software like ZFS is not a product by any definition anymore. If Oracle wants to stay in business with Solaris and ZFS they should start talking to other competing ZFS vendors and come to an agreement about an open standard for ZFS that everyone could then follow.
 
I think that Oracle has no vision of what hardware really is and means.

The deal for SUN was maybe like this : Spread the code, let it be known that our code is good, robust, ...

Show that Solaris/ZFS/... works best on SPARC

Sell more SPARC HW to people who already know and love our stuff.

Profit!

But if you think that hardware only comes from intel (think Office-compatible as a deal maker), then this does not work. How robust is that stuff? Have you ever seen some SUN servers giving up the ghost under load, when they were somewhat maintained/dusted/...? Not me. As the author of "Absolute FreeBSD" states, this kind of old dinosaur has it in common with it's wild roaming name givers that they can only be killed by a direct meteor strike. THAT was what SUN sold to customers, not some truckloads of shiny. And that is what Oracle may not get it's mind around.

But back on the topic:
Best wishes to you! And when you get fed up again you can always come back, because, no one ever really leaves ;)
 
Crivens said:
Best wishes to you! And when you get fed up again you can always come back, because, no one ever really leaves ;)
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Once a FreeBSD addict... always a FreeBSD addict. It'll take a lot to break the addiction. :D
 
A few months ago we started building our Petabyte storage which is currently located in a datacenter. It receives daily differential snapshots from many clients. We chose to use Supermicro servers and Jbod chassis.

You can't imagine the ordeal we had to go through! First of all, they were trying to sell us Nexenta. Even in simple questions their answer was we don't know if this is supported, we only support Nexenta.

Eventually, they got an email from us saying that we are NOT going to use Nexenta. We are going to use FreeBSD. If you don't like it we will choose a different supplier.

My point is that companies often use aggressive marketing strategies to promote their products. Oracle does and many others do. FreeBSD is not a company in a sense of RedHat or Canonical. But even a project like FreeBSD can create proper marketing strategies to promote and survive the competition.

Now, regarding ZFS performance in FreeBSD vs Linux. I am not so sure if the performance gain was due to ZFS alone or to the way Linux handles Samba and AFP connections. I have not run any intense application locally in order to get better results.

Somebody also mentioned that people choose Linux because they read about it and their friends use it. Well, many people who own a smartphone use Linux. Media players use Linux. Embedded Linux is everywhere so yes people are more likely to use it.

But when it comes to large ISP's I don't see why they would choose CentOS over FreeBSD for their web servers. Unless they get more support from Linux. Support also includes, hardware compatibility, fast deployment and easy maintenance.
 
Somebody also mentioned that people choose Linux because they read about it and their friends use it. Well, many people who own a smartphone use Linux. Media players use Linux. Embedded Linux is everywhere so yes people are more likely to use it.
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I don't mean users. I mean businesses. Google started out using Linux cause they used it in school. My brother-in-law tried to get me to use Linux when I first started out cause, outside of Windows, that's all he heard of. Ask anyone what non-Windows OS they would use if they had to, the first thing they would say is Linux, but it's not likely they would choose it off the top of their head for any technical reason.
But when it comes to large ISP's I don't see why they would choose CentOS over FreeBSD for their web servers. Unless they get more support from Linux. Support also includes, hardware compatibility, fast deployment and easy maintenance.
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A lot of people want Linux for compatibility or support of some sort cause it supports 16,000 versions of whatever but you only need one. Out of those 16,000 network cards Linux supports, one can find the one card, motherboard, video driver, keyboard, mouse, monitor, software and on and on, that works just as well on FreeBSD.

Just like apps on phones, one supports 32,000 apps while the other only has 20,000. It makes no difference if they both run the app I want. So I'll pick the phone, or OS, I want to use based on something else.

So using FreeBSD makes far more sense to me than Linux which I consider a hodge-podge of distributions which aren't interoperable among themselves. I installed CentOS on my new box because I took over a web site that's hosted on CentOS but that install didn't go the same as Linux Mint (I know it's not the same thing) which didn't install the same as Ubuntu which didn't work the same as ... None of them installed or worked the same as each other and least of all worked the same as FreeBSD.

And then along comes systemd and Wayland.
 
Remington said:
Once a FreeBSD addict... always a FreeBSD addict. It'll take a lot to break the addiction. :D
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Hotel FreeBSD, you can check out, but you can never leave...:P
 
gkontos said:
How can I deploy so fast and so easy so many CentOS boxes and have them also get their packages centrally updated all within hours?
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Funny thing because that's what I was thinking when I had setup my first 2 FreeBSD servers last week, my company is currently very busy in moving away from CentOS into a full conversion to FreeBSD.

Oh; the main usage of those servers is (website) hosting, so a very specific task.

Still, when I had setup CentOS in the first place I simply couldn't be bothered with setting up my own software repository because it took too much diskspace for my liking as well as quite some time to set it all up. So when I had to provision a second CentOS server I simply resorted to a default base system after which I let webmin sort out the rest of the stuff.

With FreeBSD I get the feeling it was made for redistribution. Because after I had setup my first server it became quite easy to build binary packages from my currently installed ports, and then provide those to my second FreeBSD server.

Right now its still something I'm in the process of building, I'm also looking into a dedicated backup server which I could also (ab)use for testing and setting up port updates which can then be redistributed to the other servers (thus minimizing downtime).

But even so; my experience is a bit the opposite I suppose. I was quite surprised at the sheer freedom I got when using the Ports collection. Especially the fact that a Port can never wreck havoc on the base system is a failsafe I really came to enjoy because on Linux that could be a very liable risk at times.
 
@@Sossego: I've changed your italic and red font to the [user] tag (no big deal, but I had the time to do it).

@@gkontos: You have contributed many useful posts to these forums, so I thank you for that and I wish you all the best. Hopefully we'll see you again some time.
 
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ShelLuser said:
Funny thing because that's what I was thinking when I had setup my first 2 FreeBSD servers last week, my company is currently very busy in moving away from CentOS into a full conversion to FreeBSD.
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I am really happy that your company decided to move to FreeBSD. I only wish more companies did the same. If I may ask, what made you take this decision?

ShelLuser said:
Oh; the main usage of those servers is (website) hosting, so a very specific task.
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Absolutely!

ShelLuser said:
Still, when I had setup CentOS in the first place I simply couldn't be bothered with setting up my own software repository because it took too much diskspace for my liking as well as quite some time to set it all up. So when I had to provision a second CentOS server I simply resorted to a default base system after which I let webmin sort out the rest of the stuff.
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I used spacewalk for that and I was impressed on how reliable it is.

ShelLuser said:
With FreeBSD I get the feeling it was made for redistribution. Because after I had setup my first server it became quite easy to build binary packages from my currently installed ports, and then provide those to my second FreeBSD server.

Right now its still something I'm in the process of building, I'm also looking into a dedicated backup server which I could also (ab)use for testing and setting up port updates which can then be redistributed to the other servers (thus minimizing downtime).
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What I do in those cases is to have a few virtual servers running FreeBSD. All they do is build ports into packages, world and kernel. Then I NFS export the relevant directories to the FreeBSD machines that require updates.

I also love the ports system and try not to use software that is not in the ports. Be sure that you read /ports/UPDATING every time that you want to upgrade something.

ShelLuser said:
But even so; my experience is a bit the opposite I suppose. I was quite surprised at the sheer freedom I got when using the Ports collection. Especially the fact that a Port can never wreck havoc on the base system is a failsafe I really came to enjoy because on Linux that could be a very liable risk at times.
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True, ports do not affect the system binaries and you can't wreck your system accidentally. Also, the use of /local can be a life saver too. Never mix OS software and configuration with other software.
 
Pardon my late response, I totally overlooked this thread. I sort of come and go on the forum; I usually post after or in the middle of a working day.

gkontos said:
I am really happy that your company decided to move to FreeBSD. I only wish more companies did the same. If I may ask, what made you take this decision?
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It was a two folded decision. We were already in the preparation process of moving from one hosting provider to the other (we use several VPS environments). The main difference between the two was the way they provisioned the VPS servers.

The first provider basically let you pick "Windows" or "Linux" after which they set the whole thing up. The current provider on the other hand offered a larger selection of operating systems to chose from (Windows, several Linux distributions as well as FreeBSD and OpenBSD). Better yet: after selecting one you basically boot your VPS right into the installation process. So you can set it up exactly the way you want it.

I sort of noticed FreeBSD by accident and immediately recalled the stories I read on how Sun used to help several FreeBSD programmers by porting their ZFS filesystem over to FreeBSD. ZFS is a filesystem I hold in high esteem, I've worked with it for several years on Solaris, so the possibility to move back to a ZFS powered environment was very tempting.

The second part of the decision involved around webmin (and the Virtualmin extension); it's what we use to maintain the servers and websites hosted on them. I learned that Webmin also supported FreeBSD, so I setup a testing environment and started testing.

Although Webmin doesn't support FreeBSD in every way the basic functionality is there. You can easily setup websites, change some of their settings and more importantly: easily copy websites from one server to the other.

So once I had that out of the way the final decision was simple. A different operating system while still having the same functionality. And as expected; having ZFS back in production really helps to fully utilize the system.

gkontos said:
What I do in those cases is to have a few virtual servers running FreeBSD. All they do is build ports into packages, world and kernel. Then I NFS export the relevant directories to the FreeBSD machines that require updates.

I also love the ports system and try not to use software that is not in the ports. Be sure that you read /ports/UPDATING every time that you want to upgrade something.
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Thanks for the tip! Yeah, UPDATING but also MOVED is important to keep track off, I sort of learned about that one the hard way ;)
 
ShelLuser said:
Although Webmin doesn't support FreeBSD in every way the basic functionality is there. You can easily setup websites, change some of their settings and more importantly: easily copy websites from one server to the other.
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When I hear about control panels, I leave! I have literally left contracts because they decided to install a control panel.

Webmin AFAIK is different because it does not interfere so much with the installation of your system.
 
gkontos said:
When I hear about control panels, I leave! I have literally left contracts because they decided to install a control panel.

Webmin AFAIK is different because it does not interfere so much with the installation of your system.
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Indeed.

In general I totally agree with your opinion and actually feel the same way. But you're right; webmin is different (and also why my company started using it). The thing is; most admin panels (here's looking at stuff like Plesk) enforce a (new) standard in the way you work. If you're used to vi to manually edit configuration files then you can forget about that; it no longer works because any manual changes will either be ignored or rewritten because the admin panel enforces a new standard.

I also tend to steer clear from stuff like that. It's also why I eventually started to dislike the SuSE Linux distribution even though it was one of the first I actually started to use more intensely "back in the days" (we're talking the 90's here); simply because it enforces a completely arcane way to setup several programs in comparison to other environments. For the sole reason to comply to its own GUI tools.

Webmin is indeed quite different. Not only did it fully grok (and import) my manually setup Apache configuration, it also allows us to have it both ways. If I need to apply a change to a customer website it's up to me how to do it: I can either logon to webmin and perform the changes there, or I logon to the server itself and change the Apache config file manually using vi.

For me webmin is the best of both worlds. We save time in setting up (or migrating) a customer website and any other related services (the main reason to use an admin panel) while at the same time we don't lose the flexibility to manually edit the configuration files.

It's not perfect mind you, on FreeBSD it has quite a few flaws (but who knows; maybe I can help out with that sometime). But the flexibility which it provides is something I haven't seen in other admin panels.
 
gkontos said:
A few months ago we started building our Petabyte storage which is currently located in a datacenter. It receives daily differential snapshots from many clients.
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This seems to be interesting. Why did you refuse to use Nexenta? Was it the money or something more 'personal'? If it was money, why didn't you go for Illumos, etc.?

I'm just curious. If it comes to low-end storage I would prefer OpenSolaris based OS rather than FreeBSD. I love FreeBSD, but you have to "choose a proper weapon for every battle".

What @@Remington said is actually true. There's something about FreeBSD that makes you come back. :)
 
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matoatlantis said:
This seems to be interesting. Why did you refuse to use Nexenta? Was it the money or something more 'personal'? If it was money, why didn't you go for Illumos, etc.?
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It was the fact that we wanted to use an open source OS. If not we would have used Solaris. The IllumOS options are OpenIndiana and SmartOS. I believe that the community support in FreeBSD is much better.

matoatlantis said:
I'm just curious. If it comes to low-end storage I would prefer OpenSolaris based OS rather than FreeBSD. I love FreeBSD, but you have to "choose a proper weapon for every battle".
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First of all this is a very high end storage solution, involving a lot of hardware! The hardware criteria were FreeBSD support. Also, it is very difficult to find modern hardware that is more supported in OpenIndiana or SmartOS.

matoatlantis said:
What @@Remington said is actually true. There's something about FreeBSD that makes you come back. :)
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Absolutely!
 
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gkontos said:
First of all this is a very high end storage solution, involving a lot of hardware! The hardware criteria were FreeBSD support. Also, it is very difficult to find modern hardware that is more supported in OpenIndiana or SmartOS.
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I consider high end storage to be HP P9500 and arrays similar to this one, not the custom built storage.

So I guess storage is to be shared most likely via NFS then ?
 
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