OS to replace FreeBSD

[Valeri Galtsev]

> On Mar 20, 2021, at 7:05 PM, Fongaboo <freebsd-questions at fongaboo.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> I see there have been a ton of responses to this already. I could be wrong, but I'm going to assume most of it is OS-wars. I don't have time to pour through it all. If I'm off-base and out of context, please forgive me. But wanted to offer my experience:
> 
> After nearly two decades of self-hosting DNS/mail/web on a FreeBSD colo, I decided I couldn't give FreeBSD the focus and energy it needs to be properly maintained.
> 
> I've found that Debian was the most comfortable to transition to and is a bit more painless to keep updated and patched. I've just completed a Debian box running NSD, unbound, Apache, Postfix, Dovecot, Postfixadmin & Roundcube.

If Jerry decides to move that way, your post may help him, so thanks from Jerry in advance.

To balance what you said I just add my experience of opposite move: from Linux to FreeBSD, and my servers are happily FreeBSD for about a decade. And that move from Linux to FreeBSD a lot of advantages and solved quite a number of problems Linux was giving me. But numbercrunchers and workstations I maintain for the department are Linux (and some workstations are MacOS, andMS Windows).

The search where to flee from Linux began after switch from 2.4 to 2.6 kernel. Actually some time - over a year - after that, when it became too annoying: every 45 days on average: either glibc or kernel security update ==> reboot. One of my friends started using the word Lindoze (implying irreverent name of known commercial system requiring reboot after update which happens often).

Search for the system where to flee from Linux took a couple of years. Open solaris was considered at some point as a candidate. About a time when Oracle bough out Sun Microsystems. And the joke after that acquisition was: how do we call their system now? Well, repeat many times sun-oracle faster and faster, and you will get it right: snorkel.

Jokes aside: FreeBSD ended up a choice, and very sound one. It is the highest used of BSD descendants (I will not count here commercial ones). Incidentally, Microsoft was once noticed running FreeBSD on a couple of their servers. Reboots are rare: once or twice a year the most often. Jails allow easily juggle a bunch of small servers (each being a jail on a machine hosting 10-20 jails). Some of the servers do not even exists as an individual system: they are composed of several jails, each running one (or few inseparable) services; people can ssh to the server, they appear just in separate jail where no other services (except for sshd) run. And the list of conveniences goes on.


I hope this helps to balance Fongaboo’s post ;-)

Valeri

> If you want to email me directly, I documented the whole process. I'm willing to share my walkthroughs.
> 
> 
> Fong
> 
> 
> On Fri, 19 Mar 2021, Jerry wrote:
> 
>> With the soon-to-be release of version 13 of FreeBSD and the EOL of
>> FreeBSD 11.x, I will need to invest in a new OS. Due to FreeBSD?s
>> unfortunate inability to squash bug
>> https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=237666, l am left
>> with no choice but to seek out a new OS. I need a bare-bones system
>> that can run a mail server, Postfix with Dovecot, and a few other
>> utilities.
>> -- 
>> Jerry
>> 
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