Talking points for my upcoming FBSD presentation

stratacast1

stratacast1

Hey guys,

I'm 4 months away from doing a presentation titled "Why FreeBSD in 2019" in a community of Linux and Windows admins; a group of folks who would basically consider the BSD community a dead one. Some of these guys are old enough to have worked with FreeBSD when it could be considered in its prime (late 90s, early 00s). So some of these guys will have no experience, others haven't touched it in 10-15 years, and one gentleman who knows more than I do. So that's my audience. I want to focus on FreeBSD 12 since it's hot and new. I have an hour to present, could I get some input on talking points? My thoughts right now are
  • ZFS (and hit up briefly on what it can do but maybe not too extensively since you can get the functionality in Linux barre the epicness of ZFS on root and boot environments)
  • Jails - quick overview of jails and management with iocage, my audience won't want to know jails from scratch
  • How FreeBSD is different (base system vs. picking code from many different trees)
  • What upgrades are like (boot environments, point releases and such)
  • Performance, probably just show some graphs
  • Who uses FreeBSD
  • Bhyve
  • pkg and ports
  • Why you would want these features

I think there's more I could do...this will be a bit of a sales pitch sort of talk without getting too deep into the OS. Just to show people how FreeBSD can benefit them. I'll be doing some head-to-head feature comparisons with Linux software and why FreeBSD would be better (such as ease of management of iocage management for jails compared to LXC container management with LXD on Linux)

I'd love all your input :)
 
A few more:
  • predictable release cycle (it is far cheaper to support than Linux)
  • business friendly, permissive license
  • FreeBSD does its own releasing engineering, the most important part of what is done by RedHat and similars.
Who uses FreeBSD

 
You might also want to mention that Microsoft themselves have added official FreeBSD support in Hyper-V, including FreeBSD Integration Services (BIS) (the pseudo network driver). I recommend this for two reasons:

1) I find it helps people to think "why, if software X is dead, has company Y invested quite a lot of money into it recently?". They then realize there might be more to it than they knew.

2) I find that Windows system admins (in particular) are absolutely blinded by Microsoft technology and truly believe that Microsoft is the only correct way to manage an enterprise. If you can say that their beautiful Microsoft has shown interest in FreeBSD, then perhaps they should too.

Finally you might also want to mention how similar FreeBSD is to Linux. This will help some worries between Linux admins who might fear that their knowledge of UNIX through Linux will not translate well to actual UNIX operating systems. FreeBSD is quite a bit more similar to Linux compared to HP-UX, AIX and Solaris <=10 where they really are very different.
 
rigoletto@ said:
A few more:
  • predictable release cycle (it is far cheaper to support than Linux)
  • business friendly, permissive license
  • FreeBSD does its own releasing engineering, the most important part of what is done by RedHat and similars.
Who uses FreeBSD

Click to expand...

I'll check out that video, thanks! Those are all points I'll be sure to add. For release engineering, will this be sufficient enough for conveying a point with that? Also will be sharing the release cycle stuff, such as how you can ACTUALLY trust a FreeBSD upgrade

kpedersen said:
You might also want to mention that Microsoft themselves have added official FreeBSD support in Hyper-V, including FreeBSD Integration Services (BIS) (the pseudo network driver). I recommend this for two reasons:

1) I find it helps people to think "why, if software X is dead, has company Y invested quite a lot of money into it recently?". They then realize there might be more to it than they knew.

2) I find that Windows system admins (in particular) are absolutely blinded by Microsoft technology and truly believe that Microsoft is the only correct way to manage an enterprise. If you can say that their beautiful Microsoft has shown interest in FreeBSD, then perhaps they should too.

Finally you might also want to mention how similar FreeBSD is to Linux. This will help some worries between Linux admins who might fear that their knowledge of UNIX through Linux will not translate well to actual UNIX operating systems. FreeBSD is quite a bit more similar to Linux compared to HP-UX, AIX and Solaris <=10 where they really are very different.
Click to expand...

Those are superb points. I especially like #1 since, as I said, there's a lot of Windows guys and I'm sure they'd love to know that FreeBSD works on Hyper-V or Azure. #2 is what made transitioning to FreeBSD easy for me when I did a year and a half ago. The only thing I still find daunting to this day is how much functionality there is in ZFS. Something I really need to dig deeper into
 
stratacast1 said:
I'll check out that video, thanks! Those are all points I'll be sure to add. For release engineering, will this be sufficient enough for conveying a point with that? Also will be sharing the release cycle stuff, such as how you can ACTUALLY trust a FreeBSD upgrade
Click to expand...

Release engineering is extremely complex, you may want to send an e-mail to imp@ (Warner Losh), (IIRC) who is the responsible for that, asking if he could give you some hints. :)

From HERE.
As part of his role Glen will support the Release Engineering team by improving the release build process. This includes the generation and release of virtual machine images, enhanced support for embedded targets, package building infrastructure, and release quality assurance tools.
Click to expand...
 
I think i saw it passing by in rigoletto@ video but I would absolutely talk about dtrace. In Linux there is not by default such a beautiful tool. The most common option seems to be SystemTap, but somewhere in Gregg books is written that SystemTap can hang the system;)

[EXTRA. I am still studying this stuff, i can't be of much help, I warn you there are other options in Linux, and as often happens there, too many options. In 4 months maybe i will have some scripts for you in dtrace and SystemTap to compare. For now i can't install SystemTap at work because we lack a RedHat repository part... you see, this also could be an interesting subject . I tried to install a dtrace module for Linux but it did not work out, the installing script is for an Ubuntu of 1-2 years ago and I can't install on my current Debian, I have not even tried on the RedHat . I red somwhere dtrace is available on Oracle Linux. => observe the chaos here, they are all called Linux ! ]

You can spend a word about this nice forum. This would go near documentation quality (Handbook/manpages) and community .

You can say FreeBSD does not have systemd, so the boot process is still controlled by readable sh scripts. In Linux the thing is much more confused now, also the role of cron is fading out in favour of systemd.

You can say in FreeeBSD we still have ifconfig, why change name to that command anyway. Isn't it irritating someday you must write "ip -a" after a few decades of typing "ifconfig -a" ? For what ?

FreeBSD can run Linux binaries, Linux Compatibility Layer. [takes some effort, but worth knowing]

Compare pf / ipfw to iptables. I always disliked the ugly syntax of iptables. Btw, i heard from a collegue that iptables is to be retired !

FreeBSD: solid - well thought - reliable - well documented - server oriented || Unix SYSTEM
Linux: cool - fast evolving - multipurpose - large community || Unix KERNEL
=> Makes not much sense to compare Linux and FreeBSD, more concrete would be to
compare FreeBSD v.s. RedHat or Debian or whatever.

bye
n,
 
stratacast1 said:
  • ...
  • How FreeBSD is different (base system vs. picking code from many different trees)
  • ...
Click to expand...

Perhaps, it is worth to mention one argument in the course of your above topic, which I already used some times for explaining why I prefer FreeBSD over a Linux Distro XYZ for deployment on AWS-EC2 instances.

FreeBSD comes as the base system with only a bare minimum of necessary 3rd software, and you add what you need. A Linux Distro comes with an arbitrary choice of tons of 3rd party stuff and in order Linux runs smoothly and leaves space for your data on a tiny EC2 instance, you want to remove a lot of things which you don’t need, may want to update a lot of elder versions of packages to more recent releases, and finally need to add the software which is still missing. All this makes up for a lot of more work for deploying and maintaining a tailor made system.​
 
Thanks for the additional help guys! I think this will help me immensely as I set up the slides and such. Happy to see other suggestions in the future as I'll be preparing this over the next 4 months. Much appreciated!
 
Hey Strat,

Wanted to throw my g5 d5 a5 in...

Pls consider a +1up for the power of “doas”. I have been fooling around with it now for a while.. in terms of network administration is is about to replace toilet paper as the best invention of the last couple centuries

Before I really dug into this i had no idea how awesome it really is..
 
zader said:
Hey Strat,

Wanted to throw my g5 d5 a5 in...

Pls consider a +1up for the power of “doas”. I have been fooling around with it now for a while.. in terms of network administration is is about to replace toilet paper as the best invention of the last couple centuries

Before I really dug into this i had no idea how awesome it really is..
Click to expand...

I do like security/doas myself because the syntax is substantially easier than security/sudo and the code base is a lot smaller so less chances of stuff going wrong for a security tool. But, the reason why I don't like using security/doas is persist only works on OpenBSD and it's a major pain to have to type my password for each command. I'd count it only as a plus if I was presenting on OpenBSD :)
 
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