New Year Resolution
- Published December 25th, 2007 in FreeBSD
I’m still unsure as I need to do further testing, but since I got acquainted with FreeBSD I must tell it’s a rock-stable, lean, sleek and fast operating system.
Basically, I’m considering using FreeBSD on some of my servers. The first one would be my home server, but since it’s working flawlessly with Debian I don’t see a reason for changing — if it works, don’t fix it.
I’ll have to digest this idea a little bit further and do more testing (like getting more proximate to hier(7)) as I’ve been using Linux since 1997, meaning that I have way more knowledge about Linux inners than I have about FreeBSD, but I’ve been truly impressed by it since I started using it more frequently.
Either way, both are extremely good and fast F/OSS operating systems. I’ll be well served with any of them. Let’s hope 2008 continues to be fertile in good quality Open Source code!
P.S. - Feel free to convince me on sticking with FreeBSD, considering that I don’t have reasons to complain about Linux as a server OS.
How much of a difference is it using FreeBSD over your* linux flavor?
The single most annoying thing that keeps me away from the BSDs is the arcane methods for package updates.
With any half-decent Linux distribution I know that I can keep my system up-to-date with yum or apt-get/aptitude, but last time I checked, binary updates with the BSDs were incomplete, to say the least.
Maybe that has changed recently?
Daniel,
It’s hard to explain, but it feels leaner. The feel is obviously in italic because it’s anecdotal evidence. I haven’t done any particular benchmark. Also, it seemed to consume less resources and a ps aux shows way less processes running compared to a default Linux server installation.
As for packages, and also answering Carlos, ports (I don’t know about OpenBSD or NetBSD) seems a really nice feature. You might compile it yourself (interesting for servers with particular hardware) or you grab a binary file. You can update the whole system and that’s a well-documented process.
But the thing that really kind of moved me into migrating to FreeBSD was the speed of running RoR on the machine. It was darn fast! And right now I’m focused on RoR so that’s what matters the most to me.
“You can update the whole system and that’s a well-documented process.”
Well documented, yet boring and time consuming. Last time I checked that meant “make world”.
I read that now exists something called “freebsd-update” that, at least, seems to make security updates not suck.
“ps aux shows way less processes running compared to a default Linux server installation.”
That depends on what you mean by “default”. A “ps -ef|wc -l” on a Debian system I have here returns “55″, and that includes mysql, apache, samba, and kernel threads.
“But the thing that really kind of moved me into migrating to FreeBSD was the speed of running RoR on the machine. It was darn fast!”
OK, I won’t argue if it is faster on FreeBSD or not, but I seriously doubt either Linux or FreeBSD is broken enough to let that difference be noticeable. Unless you are testing on different hardware… ;)
Hi guys :D
Talking about FreeBSD hein! :) , so lets clean up the house please!
First things first! Lets decompose the “System” in 3 parts.
1 - Kernelland
2 - Userland
3 - Third Part Aplications (apache, etc)
You guys can patch the kernel withouth building all the system! And of course you can update all system without updating any aplication. It’s just a mater of how your security policy rocks you, and of course what method fits on you too.
Or you can do it in one big step :)
(preparing the system)
”
%periodic weekly
%cp /usr/share/examples/etc/make.conf /etc
% vi /etc/make.conf
and uncoment this:
SUP_UPDATE= YES
SUP= /usr/bin/csup
SUPFLAGS= -g -L 2
SUPHOST= cvsup.uk.FreeBSD.org
SUPFILE= /usr/share/examples/cvsup/standard-supfile
PORTSSUPFILE= /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile
#DOCSUPFILE= /usr/share/examples/cvsup/doc-supfile
”
then we are caplable of doing this: (the big step i talked above)
% cd /usr/src ; make update
% make buildowrld
% make kernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or the kernel you use)
% fastboot
% make installworld
% mergemaster
% fastboot
and all your “world” Userland and Kernelland is updated :) (to read detailled information about this process just read the Makefile under /usr/src or under http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/
In my case I follow /usr/src/UPDATING and /usr/ports/UPDATING enever i run a simple (%cd /usr/src ; make update ).
To update all ports just install this two tools, one for security reasons and other for update itself:
% cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portaudit ; make install clean
% cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/porotupgrade-deve. ; make install clean
then you can follow what ports need to be updated via:
% pkg_version -l ‘
% pkg_version -l ‘
and just end the process with a simple:
% portupgrade -ar
(all, recursive)
reading stuff:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/portsnap.html
well one thing is true. I n real UNIX systems there is more than one way to do it, and FreeBSD as many. I did write about one of them. Fell free to try the others.
Best resgards
Francisco