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LET BSD Thread!
FrankCastle
Member
in General
Hello LET!
@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?
LET BSD Adoption Poll
- What BSD distros are people using?51 votes
- OpenBSD19.61%
- NetBSD0.00%
- FreeBSD54.90%
- Dragonfly BSD0.00%
- OPNsense13.73%
- pfSense11.76%
Comments
https://lowendbox.com/blog/lets-try-bsd-part-7-of-7-conclusions-about-freebsd-openbsd-netbsd-and-dragonflybsd/
We should have included you from the jump @raindog308. I wasn't aware of your blog series but I'm going to go read through it now. Very cool!
For a while now, I've always used Debian Stable for my servers but recently been working my way to using FreeBSD more. Since using Freebsd, I've noticed that it is definitely lighter on resources and the performance has been really good compared to Linux. I do hope that more hosts support BSD. Having more options is always great!
Also, I do wish there are better guides or videos on how to use BSD for beginners.
No BSD template Inside.
Hey @FrankCastle! This post looks great! Thank you so much!
I also have to read through @raindog308's BSD posts!
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
Many providers will mount a FreeBSD ISO for you. I'm running FreeBSD on VPS/dedicated hosts from: Cloudie, Crunchbits, GCP, AWS, iFog, HYEHOST, Accuris Hosting, Oracle, and Scaleway.
What's wrong with FreeBSD? We have been offering it for many years to all our VPS and dedicated servers. For example, right now, anyone can use FreeBSD 13, and 13 and 14 with ZFS on a VPS. You don't need to bother with ISOs.
Yep, we offer it through our standard templates provided by VirtFusion too. Customers can opt to install via ISO/netboot as an alternative option too.
That seems to be the consensus for many that give it a try. There are some that companies that provide BSD options from their control panel but even the ones that do not you can almost always get it working via netboot or request they mount the BSD of choice installer ISO for you.
Right, that's another very common statement and why we wanted to start this thread to see where others were at. People used to say the same for Linux (back in the early 90s when I installed Slackware from ~50 floppies). But as it got more traction and popular there were more books, guides, videos, etc for it. BSD might not overtake Linux (just like Linux is unlikely to take over Windows) but the more attention and use it gets the better the guides and videos on it will become.
I haven't runned it on any of my servers. Perhaps I should give it a try. I do have fast USB-C Stick running NomadBSD which is based on FreeBSD and I use it at least once every few days.
One provider that comes to mind of not providing FreeBSD or any BSD OS is OVH. I've seen some people suggest to use Rescue Mode as a workaround to install it but most people don't want go through the hassle of installing it through Rescue.
I've also noticed that Freebsd turns on PubKey Authentication by default, but there is a lot of hosts that either don't support adding a ssh key when ordering and users that may not have an ssh key. So often you have to use VNC to access the server to either add your key or disable ssh key authentication.
I've used OpenBSD some over the years. Never played much with Free or Net.
One of the nice things about BSD that is not appreciated by "outsiders" is that it's one codebase: kernel + userland. You can type one "make" command and it builds the entire OS. The practical benefit of this is that you avoid the Linux problem of "someone changed something in the kernel, so we need to replace ifconfig entirely".
Have you seen the "What can you do with a 64mb vps?" thread? I figured I'd chime in with an OpenBSD example.
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/4016559/#Comment_4016559
First let me note a problem with your poll: One only can select one option but some of us, I presume, have been or are using multiple BSDs.
My everyday and work (development) systems all are linux. But since quite a few years (originally due to a major client) most of my work targets BSDs, typically FreeBSD and sometimes OpenBSD and Dragonfly and occasionally also OPNsense (plus btw sometimes even more "exotic" systems like OS/2, which in certain fields still is alive).
While being on one I often curse and wish I were on the other it's hard for me to state that either BSD or linux is better. So, I'll put it like this: Both have their pros and cons but over the years I've come to clearly see that quality is better in the cathedral while everyday use is more convenient in the bazaar.
"Providers" - IMO an overrated point. Reason: yes the majority of providers limit their offers to a plethora of linux distros but, at least nowadays, really many do offer ISO installs and if they don't already have a FreeBSD image it's easy to download one (the "worst" reaction nowadays is "please provide a link to the ISO you want" *g)
"Usage" - nowadays I always use BSD on servers, usually with (at least) a kernel I customized, often a "minimized" version that runs nicely even on 256MB "mini-VMs". If I'd have a dedi storage monster (I have not) I'd highly likely use Dragonfly BSD, which IMO unfortunately due to its high resource requirements make little to no sense to run on the kind of VMs I have (max 4 cores and 8 GB memory). But I very much liked what I saw in my lab installation. I do however run a "smallish" backup and storage server (2 TB) on a somewhat old dedi I share with a friend based on FreeBSD since some years and it works perfectly fine and is super reliable.
Side note: I also have some years experience with OpenBSD and liked it a lot but it seems that nowadays the security distance between OpenBSD and FreeBSD is much smaller than it once was, so I largely stick to FreeBSD and when dealing with a particularly sensitive system there are options too.
And yes, of course I liked @raindog308's BSD series on BSDs.
I'm a poll n00b (this was my first attempt at one). Is there a way to allow people to select multiple options? If so, I didn't notice it when I created the poll but again this was my first time so I could have just overlooked it.
I picked OpenBSD because in the LowEnd ecosystem I use it the most BUT I also use FreeBSD a ton day to day (more hyperscale projects). So I would have selected both of those if I could. I do still fire up NetBSD from time to time but mainly just to see how things are progressing. I've used DragonflyBSD a few times but with the other options I never felt the need to use it as my primary choice for something. OPNsense and pfSense are just FreeBSD under the hood but instead of using prepackaged firewall solutions I always roll my own OpenBSD solution in those situations. Regardless of your choice, I don't think think there's a bad one.
Cool!
Thanks for this link! Somehow, I missed that thread.
What is the smallest BSD which has sources and can self-compile? Would the smallest BSD be the "normal" OpenBSD release, or might there be a smaller-than-normal version from OpenBSD or from Net or Free?
Sorry, me not know either. My experience with (and interest in) polls is very limited.
ACK - but based on my experience I'd say there are more attractive ones and less attractive ones.
Cool thread. I've been wanting to play around with BSD for a long time.
Some questions:
Sorry if some of these might be dumb. Never touched a BSD before and I think personal experience might be valuable here over google results, especially since I'm sure it depends on whether you're using BSD at scale like Netflix or for your cheapo hobbyist VPS
That's an interesting question...is there a micro BSD distro? Like Tiny Core Linux only BSD?
TCL requires 46MB RAM.
Pro has to be the code quality. Every BSD is not just a kernel, it's a complete operating system. There are no missmatchs between different kernel versions and certain software, everything is a complete system designed to just work. You can compile the entire system, kernel and complete userland, with a single 'make' command.
Also, stability and performance is second to none.
Cons might be that the latest cutting edge software versions are sometimes not available as soon on BSD as it is on Linux. It's not a big problem, but it happens.
Very rarely. And if it happens, FreeBSD has a pretty awesome Linux compatibility layer that allows it to run native Linux binaries, sometimes even better than they run on Linux.
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/
It's actually really really good.
I've been running both BSD and Linux for 30 years so I have some experience in both.
Sure but that's true for pretty much everything, no? For instance, with Linux some people like Arch, some prefer Debian or RedHat or maybe even Gentoo. Hell even with Windows some people won't leave Windows 7 and even with Windows 11 having been out for years it just recently surpassed Windows 10 usage. What's attractive to me may not be attractive to you. My point was that they can all be used to get the job done.
My pleasure.
I've never actually done an in depth comparison. I just saw that thread and saw what Linux users were posting so figured I'd try a quick test with OpenBSD to see how it stacked up. With many 1GB VPS offers for $10/year I don't think anyone has to be too concerned about memory these days. Other than pushing the limits for fun of course.
I do not recall seeing any specfic memory requirements for OpenBSD but it ran just fine with 32MB for me. I even had it running a web server. I didn't do a detailed analysis but I did notice a decent performance impact going from 128MB down to 64MB and then even more so going from 64MB to 32MB but everything worked. I'm fairly certain it could work with just 16MB if I optimized the kernel, all my tests were done with the default one (which has quite a bit of stuff that I don't need). With how cheap memory is these days I honestly don't see much need going with less than 128MB but it's definitely possible and pretty easy to do with BSD.
Sorry, probably my response was misleading. My point wasn't to introduce something weird through a backdoor. My point was that your statement "Regardless of your choice, I don't think think there's a bad one." is correct; what I wrote was meant merely as a addendum along the line of "but still, wisely pick the BSD that's best suited for a given task and context".
After your last comment I couldn't but note that the criteria for your examples (like "Debian or Gentoo?") are substantially different from those applicable to the BSDs. For instance, I know more than a few people picking this linux over that linux distro because "it's easier", "it's beginner friendlier", "it's having a different (and supposedly better) init system", etc but virtually none for the BSDs. For BSDs it's quite different; they all have roughly the same learning curve steepness/beginner hurdles, they pretty much all follow the same basic guidelines, etc. and the differences may seem superficial but sometimes reach deep. NetBSD for example is quite different from FreeBSD or OpenBSD. In fact it's the only BSD I try to avoid (although it also does have some very nice points).
I'm not sure as I've not tried to minimize my builds any further than I happened to need (256 MB incl. running a few server applications). The major reason was that FreeBSD switched to LLVM which is a really fat beast and bloats especially the lib directories.
Plus, it's increasingly difficult to find 256 MB VM on offer and I've more than enough of those, so why even try to get the OS even smaller ...
Hello! Always nice to see you!
Not my personal view, but I can imagine a response to your question somewhat along the lines of:
Instead of "get the OS even smaller," perhaps "avoid adding unnecessary features."
Best wishes!
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!
I disagree. Who needs stinkin Docker when we have jails! Me certainly not. As for Raspberry PI I see no urgency. At all.
Hi @jsg!
Always great to see you!
Friend @jsg, please let me ask you a favor. Let's please keep the tone of this thread positive.
Instead of just (1) disagreeing, maybe we could add a positive contribution? Instead of (2) calling Docker "stinkin," maybe we could discuss specific advantages of jails? Is there really anything all that (3) "certainly not" in life? (4) "No urgency at all" for adding more positivity, but, if you can at least take it a little easier on the negativity, that would be great!
Speaking of the Raspberry Pi, here's something fun: Ken Thompson at SCALE20x mentions "Raspbian"
Let's enjoy all the BSDs and Linux and Docker and the Raspberry Pi here in our beautiful Low End!
Best wishes and kindest regards!
Tom