LES BSD Thread!
Hello LES!
@FrankCastle, @Crab, and @Not_Oles want to point the spotlight on freely available, currently updated software derived from the Berkeley Software Distribution ("BSD").
We want people who have never tried BSD to give it a shot. Also, we ask for other people's insights, adventures, use cases, and general feedback on BSD. We want to survey members and providers to find out who here already is using BSD in any part of their setup.
These days, BSD includes the following popular distros, and more:
Why BSD?
Security -- OpenBSD aims to be "NUMBER ONE for security."
Portability -- NetBSD works on 57 CPU architectures!
Speed -- FreeBSD Performance Milestones by Netflix!
- "2017 -- First 100 Gb/s CDN server"
- "2020 -- First 200 Gb/s CDN server"
- "2021 -- First 400 Gb/s CDN server"
- "2022 -- First 800 Gb/s CDN server"
- "2023 -- First 100 Gb/s CDN server consuming only 100W of power"
BSD Opportunities!
- Do you want to try BSD?
- Can you please share a little about your BSD insights and adventures?
- Providers and members, please tell us about your special BSD use cases and interesting BSD feedback!
- Do any Providers who support BSD want to make a special offer for people using BSD?
LES BSD Adoption Poll
- What BSD distros are people using?33 votes
- OpenBSD15.15%
- NetBSD3.03%
- FreeBSD45.45%
- Dragonfly BSD3.03%
- OPNsense9.09%
- pfSense24.24%
Comments
Hey @FrankCastle! This post looks great! Thank you so much!
I want to see offers from Providers who support BSD. Yes on BSD VPSes, but I also do know someone who likes dedis and would love to spend on a great BSD dedi deal!
BSDDD!!! /s
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
I was using OpenBSD and FreeBSD for a while but found FreeBSD more easy to use hence I use this today.
How to install it to vps?
ISO mount, because not even 5% of the providers offer *BSD as an installable template.
Keeping topical (on a different thread), what web control panel(s) do people typically use, with BSD?
It wisnae me! A big boy done it and ran away.
NVMe2G for life! until death (the end is nigh)
I always highly appreciated providers who offer latest FreeBSD templates or latest FreeBSD ISO. It is like showing passion for consumers while keeping track with newer options and updates for their clients.
Does *BSD support/have cloud-init?
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The poll should be multiple choice, I use both Open- and FreeBSD regularly.
There you go fellas, FreeBSD 14 as template.
Host-C - VPS Services Provider - AS211462
"If there is no struggle there is no progress"
Thank you @FrankCastle for this information, I was not aware of it.
You should add 1 more thing to the list, a brand so loved by many, JUNIPER, as JUNOS is FreeBSD based.
Host-C - VPS Services Provider - AS211462
"If there is no struggle there is no progress"
Thank you for sharing your experience. What exactly did you find difficult about OpenBSD or what made FreeBSD easier to use for you?
Of course it does, FreeBSD14 and newer offers it natively (so not bsd flavored only). Using it with VirtFusion and it works just as easy as Linux.
FreeBSD has pkg package manager which has many binaries available that are up to date. If you need to manually install a package through ports for customization, the package manager will still recognize it after compilation and you can query pre-build and customized installations in one run. Additionally, I'm using Ansible and there are more modules with support for FreeBSD than OpenBSD (might have changed but OpenBSD support was rare or instable).
I enjoy lurking in the BSD forums.
I use pfsense. Should I switch to opensense?
Say you were a boy who wanted to enjoy his old 2010 Macbook that still performs great, but has a Nvidia 320M chipset that is no longer supported by Nvidia. (In case you were wondering, the Nouveau driver causes this chipset to run extremely hot.) Is it difficult to compile the Nvidia driver on BSD?
As a long-term windows user, I prefer to use BSoD.
Hey teamacc. You're a dick. (c) Jon Biloh, 2020.
We have FreeBSD templates for our customers. A quick search, I found maybe a dozen VMs using FreeBSD templates. There might be more that did an ISO install with a flavor of BSD.
I use Opnsense for my home network and it works well. I also use Mac OSX, so that is BSD adjacent.
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How about adding NetBSD and OpenBSD?
I need to go look at your site. I see that your sig contains the magic words, "Dedicated Servers."
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
It is very nice to see a lot of comments already on this thread! Thank you @FrankCastle and @Not_Oles for putting such a strong effort into this and making the thread happen!
I personally started with FreeBSD many years ago when I had issues getting IBM MegaRAID working with UW320 SCSI controller and a pack of screaming 15k RPM drives on Linux (cannot remember the distro anymore, might've been Slackware) despite of getting their driver disks. IBM provided FreeBSD drivers as well and since I haven't had any change to try it yet, I thought to give it a try and it just worked straight off the bat, and I haven't looked back much since
The journey has walked me through many cool projects like HAST, CARP, ZFS, pfSense, etc and most of the production servers I have ever ran and continue to run from 512MB BuyVM box to big MySQL server running 6+TB database have been FreeBSD based.
I haven't spend much time on OpenBSD or NetBSD though, but FreeBSD has always provided me a solid, extremely stable foundation with good software support. Naturally it is not for everybody, but most common and many uncommon use cases are well supported thanks to active ports repository where you can build everything from the scratch wink wink @Not_Oles
It would be nice to see it to support Docker (yes I know jails and bhyve) and Raspberry PI support is still flaky, but nobody is perfect!
How much watts consumed by 800 Gbps variant?
P.S. I love Open BSD logo. That puffer fish is insanely cute.
I'd be happy to have the other distros. I just need to find a good qcow2 template for them and maybe some guinea pigs to test them out since I am not as familiar with BSD. Maybe some free VPS opportunities!
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Sorry, I don't remember how many watts. I don't even remember whether power was mentiond. But it might have been mentioned in the PDF slides or in the related video which is available on Youtube. If you take a look and find the power numbers, please post them. Thanks! Best wishes!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Openstack says,
BSD-Cloud-Image.org says,
BSD-Cloud-Image.org seems to have Free, Net, Open, and Dragonfly.
I haven't tried any of the BSD-Cloud-Image.org images. The About pages says that the serial console is enabled by default. Yaaay! Also, there is an associated Github account and Blog, neither of which I have looked at yet.
@linveo If you add the images, and, as you mentioned, provide a few free test accounts, I bet you will find some valiant testers right here in this thread.
Best wishes!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
But no NetBSD 10, only 9.3.
Did someone say freebie?!
It wisnae me! A big boy done it and ran away.
NVMe2G for life! until death (the end is nigh)
I'm second in line!
I would like to use BSD but the only thing that is stopping me is the lack of good support for the RTL8821CE WiFi Chipset. Other than that, I have used FreeBSD mostly in some of my servers as a pastime project.
And also I have used OPNSense for quite a few of my "homelab"-ing ventures. It's good.
youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
As I came from System V roots, BSD would seem a natural choice but 'mainline' Linux got in the way. There's the practicality of drivers for desktop use, along with essential programs (Apps, for the kids out there).
It wisnae me! A big boy done it and ran away.
NVMe2G for life! until death (the end is nigh)
I would also love to use FreeBSD on laptop and desktop workstation, but lack of proper drivers is what drives me away. I love it on cloud servers though (where it is available).
I think I've tried FreeBSD once many years ago when I was trying to learn Unix like operating systems. I ended up going the Linux route. because it was easier to find OS templates for different Linux operating systems from multiple hosts. Then I came across Docker and application containers became a necessity.
I'm open to revisiting BSD, but it seems difficult from a newcomer's perspective who's interested in ultimately creating and deploying applications to understand why to use BSD. It's not purely because of BSD vs Linux, but it's the ecosystem - what can be done in a production environment on top of the OS.
For something like a firewall, OPNsense and pfsense seem like very via able options in terms of performance, purpose, and accessibility.
However, with jails vs OCI container, it's much harder to figure out how can jails be easily deployed horizontally in a production environment (meaning with management and observability). For Linux, there are options like Docker Swarm, Kubernetes variants, etc that make it easier (you can argue with less thinking) to deploy something reasonably good. But, with jails, there are options that are not that obvious, to me at least, that can go outside of a homelab or testing environment - LittleJet and Pot are things I've seen.
I haven't looked into it, but if there was something that I could deploy, say a load balancer with modern UX and monitoring (or ease to extend) that was only available in BSD and better than what's available on Linux, it would be a good enough excuse for me to give it a try.
No takers?
Mind you, given the "fun & games" with hestiacp DNS clusters (poorly documented/explained), then I may have to go back three decades to CLI admin duties. Gawd, even sysadmsh gave some assistance!
It wisnae me! A big boy done it and ran away.
NVMe2G for life! until death (the end is nigh)
Appreciate the resources! I have loaded up NetBSD and OpenBSD from this in addition to the existing FreeBSD. So I am looking for BSD experienced people that would like to test these two new images out. I am offering a 4GB Intel KVM VPS in any of the locations in exchange for this beta testing. Interested people can PM me, just need a few. Keep in mind these servers need to stay on BSD or else they will be revoked. Don't grab one and then just switch it over to Windows in a few weeks.
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