confessions of a FreeBSD purist

[Eric S Pulley]

On Sat, 17 Nov 2012 01:28:02 -0500
Matthew Pope <mpope at teksavvy.com> wrote:

> 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)

Seriously? You're going to run some VM image that a guy on the internet
gives you? Boy am I glad you switched over to Linux, good luck with
that.