How do you use yours?

RypPn

RypPn

Always interested to read how others actually use their FreeBSD installs.

I used to run esxi on a hardware raid 10 server and reappropriated this into a proxmox server to virtualise a bunch of freebsd instances, these are (in no particular order)

A mail server running postfix, dovecot, amavis and clamav.

Jail host, still running ezjail, not got round to moving it over to io-cage or something more recent yet, it runs my NextCloud and znc bouncer jails. Also houses my dokuwiki setup, transmission server and sabnzbd interface.

PPTP vpn, because none of the other vpn's I've tried handle voip calls very well, they all seem to mangle rtp audio . Stuck on freebsd 13 as 14 seems to break mpd5 somehow.

Ampache server for providing an interface to my digital audio collection from my nas via read-only nfs shares.

Openvpn instance, bit of a clunker to set up, but it does work, albeit slowly.

Poudriere server, to keep all the packages I use up to date and in one place.

Wireguard, currently using OpenBSD for this but should make the effort to migrate it to freebsd, but it just works so not a pressing need to move it any time soon.

My intranet server, more of an rss landing page to keep me abreast of current news.

Lastly my piwigo gallery houses my photo's.

Currently looking into how to set up a cups server to hand off the house ios devices to a legacy printer for those once in a blue moon print jobs.

I do have a second server I had set up to try byve on, but after a while it just got a bit unwieldy, it's sorely lacking some kind of GUI interface.

Gone are the days of my den sounding like a server farm with all the extract fans from multple pc's running, now it's all housed in a single box quietly purring away under my desk.

So, there we are, that's what I use freebsd for, how do you use yours?
 
I run two FreeBSD servers. One is my main home server, which is also the router (DNS and DHCP server, firewall, feeds the internal house network from the internet outside). It is mostly a storage and monitoring machine, with tens of thousands of documents on it. It monitors our water supply system (since we live in a rural area, we do our water ourselves). The second one is hosted in the cloud, and used as an external fallback and monitoring host, in case the machine at home is unreachable or fails. Neither has a GUI or X installed, they are pure servers.

Sometimes I install an extra machine on some old laptop, usually to test a new release before install (in the rare case that I have to reinstall instead of upgrading, have done that I think 2 or 3 times in the last 15 years of using FreeBSD). I have also tried FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi machines, but on the older Pi versions, it's very hard, and many things that work seamlessly on Rasbian/Debian are difficult with FreeBSD, so back to industry-standard servers it is.
 
FreeBSD has been my "daily driver" OS for 15+ years. I have two 13.3 workstations, both connecting to NFS shares on a NAS to provide music and video (movies, TV, etc.). The older one dual-boots Windows 10 for the rare occasions I want to add music to my phone with iTunes. Other than that there really isn't anything I need that can't be done on FreeBSD. Wine runs the few games I play (Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Overload, which is basically the next version of Descent) just fine, LibreOffice does the admittedly-light stuff I need from an office suite, and Chromium with the linux-widevine-cdm package allows watching shows on Amazon, Apple TV and Hulu. The newer workstation has more resources and handles Bhyve virtual machines (various FreeBSD VMs for testing upgrades and a RHEL 9 VM with an Oracle database) very well.
 
forums.freebsd.org

How did you switch to FreeBSD?

I've been a windows 10 user for years now, and before Windows 7, but I've been also booting Linux distributions on a Live USB to get away from Windows from time to time, and I've been trying FreeBSD on a virtual machine, lately I've only been having too many issues with Windows 10 (and I'd never...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
Interesting thread, pity it degenerated into a linux and windows flamewar, I'd have given a history of my OS exposure in that thread but I think I'll just let it die on the vine...

My main purpose for this thread was to feed inspiration to myself and possibly others as to what actually gets done with it. Not tell the tales of woe of a decade maintaining AIX with the blue monster and pkgadd horror-stories...anyway, I digress, back to your usual programming.
 
RypPn said:
Gone are the days of my den sounding like a server farm with all the extract fans from multple pc's running, now it's all housed in a single box quietly purring away under my desk.
Click to expand...
I believe I am in the same boat. I have some really cool Sun Fire (V210) machines that I am itching to use again but... I can't justify the darn noise (or energy usage).

And gutting one just to put a crappy Raspberry Pi in it seems like heresy. So sadly I just use a really boring (but quiet and efficient) amd64 as my home server.

Same reason why I don't tinker too much with AIX as a hobby anymore. The machines are just not appropriate and I feel IBM might be missing an opportunity here to sneak back into the hearts of developers (minus the whole Red Hat thing...).
 
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