Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

I notice FreeBSD admins tend to follow a 'pets not cattle' approach, carefully nurturing individual systems. Linux admins like myself typically prefer the 'cattle not pets' mindset—using infrastructure-as-code where if a server dies, no problem, just spin up another one. Leverage containers. Statelessness.

I don't want to spend time meticulously configuring things beyond the core infrastructure my services run on. I should probably explore FreeBSD more, but honestly, with containers being everywhere now, I'm not seeing a compelling reason to bother. I realize jails are a valid analogue, but broadly speaking the UX is not the same.

All this being said, I have this romantic draw to FreeBSD and want to play around with it more. But every time I set up a basic box I feel teleported back to 2007.

Are there any fun lab projects, posts, educational series targeted at FreeBSD?

> I notice FreeBSD admins tend to follow a 'pets not cattle' approach, carefully nurturing individual systems. Linux admins like myself typically prefer the 'cattle not pets' mindset—using infrastructure-as-code where if a server dies, no problem, just spin up another one.

I've worked at 'pets not cattle' and 'cattle not pets', and I vastly prefer pets. Yes, you should be able to easily bring up a new pet when you need to; yes, it must be ok if pet1 goes away, never to be seen again. But no, it's not really ok when your servers have an average lifetime of 30 days. It's very hard to offer a stable service on an unstable substrate. Automatic recovery makes sense in some cases, but if the system stops working, there's a problem that needs to be addressed when possible.

> All this being said, I have this romantic draw to FreeBSD and want to play around with it more. But every time I set up a basic box I feel teleported back to 2007.

Like another poster mentioned; this is actually a good thing. FreeBSD respects your investment in knowledge; everything you learned in 2007 still works, and most likely will continue to work. You won't need to learn a new firewall tool every decade, whichever of the three firewalls you like will keep working. You don't need to learn a new tool to configure interfaces, ifconfig will keep working. You don't need to learn a new tool to get network statistics, netstat will keep working. Etc.

> But no, it's not really ok when your servers have an average lifetime of 30 days. It's very hard to offer a stable service on an unstable substrate.

The whole cattle mindset because at the end of the day everything is a "unstable substrate" your building a stable service on unstable blocks pets don't solve the issue that each pet is fundamentally unstable and your just pretending it's not.

I’ve had Linux servers with > 1 year of uptime. I’ve seen much, much higher. It’s entirely possible to have a stable foundation; it’s modern software that’s hot garbage, and relies on ephemerality to stay running.