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Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

(aumont.fr)
190 points psxuaw | 4 comments | 31 Mar 25 12:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.503s | source
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asveikau ◴[31 Mar 25 16:22 UTC] No.43536779[source]▶
ZFS is probably the biggest reason for me. I have a machine with a zfs pool running samba and nfsd.

Philosophically I tend to prefer *BSDs over Linux. I have a few FreeBSD machines, one OpenBSD, and one Linux.

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0x457 ◴[31 Mar 25 17:15 UTC] No.43537356[source]▶
> ZFS is probably the biggest reason for me.

Maybe in the past there was an argument for that, but ever since FreeBSD started using OpenZFS implementation...what's the difference?

My ideal OS would be something like NixOS, but on FreeBSD and with better language than Nix.

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bluGill ◴[31 Mar 25 20:39 UTC] No.43539695[source]▶
ZFS is a first class part of FreeBSD. you can use it on linux, but it will always have some rough edges. How rough it open to question though, for some it works well.
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tomxor ◴[31 Mar 25 22:16 UTC] No.43540561[source]▶
Used ZFS on Debian in production for 8 years, yet to experience rough edges but always interested to learn.
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1. turtledragonfly ◴[31 Mar 25 22:38 UTC] No.43540716[source]▶
Do you use ZFS for root, on Debian? (enabling "boot environments")

I've recently switched my FreeBSD setups to use that scheme, and it's been nice. Would be interested to hear if it's similarly straightforward on Debian (my second-favorite OS :)

Obviously requires support in the bootcode; I'm not sure of the state of that for Linux.

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2. Numerlor ◴[31 Mar 25 22:54 UTC] No.43540870[source]▶
I've been running zfs on root on my Debian home server, only the install was a tiny bit more involved but it was done in maybe half an hour going off of the guide and trying to understand everything it was doing with 0 experience (... And then did it again after I broke networking after an hour lol)
3. tomxor ◴[01 Apr 25 00:06 UTC] No.43541407[source]▶
No, to be fair I use it for everything except root (which I prefer to backup as IaC, not that I wouldn't use ZFS, it's just not default so requires more effort). I use ZFS datasets to back everything except the OS, including DBs which has been the most satisfying aspect of using ZFS (being able to snapshot live DBs together with all other relevant state rather than a as a separate replication process).

While I can't comment on using it for root, I can say for other use, the only annoyance I have is compiling the kernel module on every single update. This is automatically handled by APT, but for very small servers it can be slow... at most ~15 mins. Could be solved with private distribution for a large fleet but I can't be bother with that stuff. Hoping at some point Debian will relax their strict "to the letter of the GPL" attitude at some point like they did with install media drivers. But it's not the worst experience, at least installing is automated.

4. free652 ◴[01 Apr 25 01:54 UTC] No.43542038[source]▶
zfsbootmenu https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/v3.0.x/

Also nice way to recover zfs if anything goes wrong. yea, it's a linux image for just booting. But you put it as an EFI image, and works great.