A brief look at FreeBSD

I fondly remember working with FreeBSD in my younger days when I would tinker more.

Back in those days I could make any Windows installation unrecoverable. I could severely botch a Linux system. But FreeBSD would always keep chugging, no matter what crazy idea I wanted to try.

It may not be the fastest. It may not be the flashiest. But in my mind, it has this whole "reliability" thing written all over it like no other OS has.

For instance, when I was a student (and thus poor), I had a PC made of (free) scavenged parts. It wouldn't boot Windows. Linux would crash during boot. But FreeBSD just chugged along like there were no issues at all.

I later discovered there were some physical issues with the UDMA mode on the IDE controller, and that's probably what tripped of the other OSes, but FreeBSD would just work. Albeit slowly, but it actually ran fine. For years.

So while I no longer rely on FreeBSD myself, I look back on it with fondness. That's also why I decided to help port .NET to FreeBSD when the first cross-platform version of .NET Core was launched (for Windows, Linux and Mac only). I thought every decent OS deserved to have a working .NET version ;)

A little less than 25 years ago, my then-new day job wanted me to build them a new mail server, using Linux.

I'd put together one or two public-facing mail servers before, but it'd been a few years and the landscape had changed (postfix was the new hotness, sendmail was old news, etc). And I had a FreeBSD machine at home that I'd previously built from garbage that I was using for NAT and a few other things.

So, wanting to appear all slick and stuff at the new job, I built a prototype at home on that FreeBSD box using a freebie dyndns subdomain (which was still practical at that time).

It all worked great. For a couple of years I even used it to host my own email at home. It was less trouble to maintain than the Linux-based thing I'd built at work even though they both started with the same software configs.

But that FreeBSD box was only ever a little forgettable trash-built machine, so there were no backups at all when the hard drive crashed completely (there were grooves worn into the platters) while I was out of town.

Which might normally be the end of the story, but: FreeBSD kept rolling just fine. Whatever data was in RAM (which apparently included at least sshd and bash) remained in RAM and stayed usable, and it kept routing packets like nothing had ever happened at all.

I marveled at this for a few weeks as this very broken machine kept flawlessly doing its NAT duties and providing solid Internet access for my LAN until I scrounged up enough pennies to buy my first "home router": A Linksys WRT54GS. (That little hackable Linux box was a very fun introduction to the rabbit hole of using hardware in unintended ways, but that's a story for a different comment section.)