confessions of a FreeBSD purist

[Matthew Pope]

Dear FreeBSD community,

It has been wonderful being a full-fledged member of this community, an 
administrator running FreeBSD on bare hardware (in his basement) for 
years.  This is the coolest, hippiest, historically pure, and most 
technically advanced UNIX community on the planet (I'm one of the more 
long in the tooth members.)  I used Dummynet about four years ago to 
replay bad Internet weather and prove my hypothesis of what servers 
caused failure in a multi-tier, forex trading system failure.

This week I reformatted the last two machines in my basement running 
FreeBSD. I feel really guilty.  I installed Ubuntu (10.04) because its 
GUI is great, its very well supported, and I had a heck of a time 
keeping my FreeBSD jails configured and stable, and I'd stopped running 
a web site for a while now.

I installed 10.04 instead of 12.04 because on another machine I had 
attempted to upgrade to 12.04 LTS while running the dual boot 
configuration, and it trashed my MBR (a known defect.) You have been 
warned, etc. It also has that radically different GUI, and really 
annoying, an entirely different directory tree on the disk.  FreeBSD 
contributors would never tamper so much with something that worked so well.

However, I do need to run a web site again, and I am more than convinced 
on the superior performance, and hardening possible with FreeBSD bind, 
and Apache running in jails. However, I'd like to run FreeBSD in a 
VMWare or VirtualBox VMs.  This gives me the ability to take snapshots 
to recover easily when I break something. Computing resources are like 
candy these days.  My fast box has 4 screaming fast processors with 8 GB 
of RAM, and that is a three year old machine.  There is no reason 
FreeBSD cannot run with adequate performance in a VM and run bind, and 
perhaps on another physical box, have a FreeBSD VM running Apache, both 
in jails.  I know others are doing it.

Could anyone be kind enough to recommend a free, or share their own 
FreeBSD VM image that has bind pre-configured in a jail, and / or an 
Apache web server pre-configured in a jail, for a non-commercial site?  
With this configuration I can revert after breaking something as an 
over-eager, semi-qualified system administrator.

Cheers,
Matthew (in Toronto)