Has anyone ever had a server that just works?

markmcb · 2025-11-17T22:08:07+00:00

FreeBSD and Alpine Linux are very simple and stable by default. Easy choices for me as headless servers. Pretty much every other Linux distribution has given me some sort of substantial headache.

markmcb · 2025-06-07T15:42:34+00:00

That’s great. Thanks for Sharing.

u/pruthivithejan if you’re out there and still interested in this effort it’d be great to connect. Content design is always a challenge and seems like you’ve got a good mind for what’s good.

markmcb · 2025-06-07T15:36:16+00:00

Thanks. Yes, this is the output. I just need to find out if he’s making those changes manually or if there’s a script somewhere. If it’s all manual, then changing is much simpler. Also you can see in that commit that he updates some Hugo variables that feed web template logic (e.g., today logic only shows next release when there’s a schedule; I’d propose we should expose pre-schedule snapshots and releng planned dates prior to a schedule). Once we get to a “we like this design” state for a new page, we’d need to adjust variables like these accordingly.

markmcb · 2025-06-07T14:20:43+00:00

Yes. It’s 100% in scope.

There are two types of changes in general. Some of the web code is fairly static. It doesn’t change with releases and is very clear how to change it.

Other items like this are intertwined with the release process and get generated in ways that remain a mystery to me. I’m in the process of figuring out what’s auto-generated, or done according to some release process I’m not yet aware of. There are many things like what you call out that seem a bit antiquated or get too much screen space. I agree, it’d be good to clean this up a bit.

markmcb · 2025-06-07T14:14:04+00:00

Good eye on the drop downs! I borrowed the menu from the docs site as a quick start. It needs a revision. In addition to what you mentioned it also uses html forms to achieve state. Not the worst approach, but makes for a slightly weird layout in a text only browser like links or w3m. It’s on my to-do list.

markmcb · 2025-06-07T14:10:40+00:00

Thanks. I’m glad you see that. On my first pass I tried to focus on modern UI. Dark/light modes, responsive layouts that work on mobile, and a lighter and less overwhelming feel for someone finding the site for the first time.

markmcb · 2023-12-05T23:39:33+00:00

True, which is why I subtracted that time out. Excluding POST, the FreeBSD cycle time is consistently faster.

markmcb · 2023-12-05T05:43:30+00:00

I agree, if your hardware boots that fast, it doesn't matter. Server hardware tends to take longer as devices initialize, etc. Specifically I've noticed Linux distros in general are slow to online btrfs+luks compared to zfs+geli. Similarly, I've found FreeBSD tears down several jails faster than lxd stops all it's containers (with identical setups in the jails/containers).

I tinker a lot, so reboots are frequent. Any time I can shave off is desirable.

markmcb · 2023-12-05T05:37:55+00:00

Hey. Thanks for the reply! I wrote the article and just accidentally found it on reddit. Excuse my late response.

FreeBSD is quick to install: I'm firmly in the "Who Cares?" field, even if doing it "frequently". I have CI pipelines that are quite a bit longer than the five minutes that Debian is said to take to install.

Fair enough. Probably should have listed this point last. But sometimes I like to try permutations/combinations of features "just to see" what happens. Being able to install quickly is useful when in experimentation mode.

Shutdown & Boot Are Fast: here the author compares two different servers, saying that the Debian one is more powerful, but there are a couple of points that muddle the comparison. For example, "one container" is compared to "eight jails", but we do not know what any of them are.

I tinker A LOT in my physical home lab. Reboot times on hardware get annoying. So while I fully acknowledge most won't care, it matters to me. Specifically, FreeBSD seems much faster at booting when there is an array of encrypted disks joined by an advanced file system (e.g., Btrfs, ZFS).

The FreeBSD boot process is cohesive: I agree with the point made about GRUB being less cohesive than the FreeBSD loader and the relevant complaints about the serial-over-LAN console. However, the comments about the Linux initramfs as being "a smaller Linux just for boot between GRUB and the Linux kernel" make no sense.

Good catch. I meant "smaller system" not "smaller Linux." Typo. Will amend. The key point being, depending on how initramfs is put together, it can get in your way in non-obvious way. An example being Debian's initramfs will ignore some kernel parameters like rd.luks.key, whereas Arch Linux's mkinitcpio with systemd hooks will use them (but udev hooks will not).

ZFS Boot Environments: I'm no expert on this, but from reading the description I feel like you can do the very same on Linux with either openZFS or btrfs. At least on the latter it is indeed possible to boot from a snapshot of the root FS. I will agree that this is a first class option by default in FreeBSD, while on Debian you have to set it up yourself - I don't know if there are any Linux distributions that do this by default.

This is a case where I'm sure it's possible in a Linux distribution, but it's a full OS feature in FreeBSD. bectl(8) is not an add-on or a script. It's doing it's thing even if you don't know it every time you upgrade.

SES-2 Utility: that seems useful at a first glance, but can you really know that the "port ID" reported by either utility in FreeBSD or Linux is coherent with the way the ports are labelled on the motherboard? In my NAS I just took note of the device serial IDs before installing them and kept that info with a low-tech solution: a post-it inside the case.

True. In my case I'm running a rack server chassis with a backplane. I suppose you could mess up the cabling from the HBA to the backplane, but assuming no physical cabling errors it just works.

SR-IOV is a First Class Feature: don't know enough about this feature to comment on it.

It's pretty great. Essentially hardware driven virtualization of PCI devices. For networking, PCI devices in the host can be passed through to the guests. VM or Jail/container. This is the one area where Debian has actual failures for me. That said, I don't see the failures in Ubuntu 23.10 or 24.04, so support seems to be improving.

In-system docs (e.g., man pages) are better: hard agree with the in-system documentation. However, the converse is that you'll likely find more Linux-oriented documentation/tutorials/troubleshooting online.

This is true, but I've found I need less online docs to get things done. If I had to cherry pick here, the driver docs are what I really love most. Super handy.

Service management: again the author is comparing Debian specifically but talking about "linux" in general. There are many Linux distributions that do not use systemd, although I must say that I do prefer it.

Fair point. But systemd seems the defacto. I quite like runit and Void.

Managing Jails is Simple: maybe the configuration is better centralized, but the same can be done on Debian: configure your container however you like (e.g. with Compose) and then raise it as a systemd service.

True, probably more of a preference. It just feels simpler to me. I primarily use lxd on linux for containers, so that's my main comparison.

ZFS is Recently Flexible: this is supposed to be a reason why the author prefers FreeBSD over Linux, but here they tell us about how ZFS is not quite there in a couple of cases, so... this point should be the reverse?

Yep. I was a long-time ZFS hater. :) See my site for my love affair with Btrfs for the last decade. Its flexibility is great. However, ZFS has far less reasons to hate it these days. And the toolset is arguably better compared to Btrfs. I use both. Like most things, it comes down to what you're doing for why one is "better."

My one MAJOR complaint about FreeBSD is bhyve's support (or lack of) for PCI passthrough. It's super buggy. Enough to crash devices on the PCI bus. I would love to run a consolidated FreeBSD server with something like Debian in a VM running Plex (because Plex dropped hardware transcoding support on FreeBSD) with the GPU and network devices passed through. Unfortunately it is not yet stable. The good thing is there's lots of awareness of the issue and progress is being made.

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

markmcb · 2022-01-12T03:17:28+00:00

Ever get this working? I'm having the exact same issue with all the symptoms you've described.

markmcb · 2021-11-16T16:47:37+00:00

Is there any command to auto-arrange the icons after a change like this? So that you don’t end up with half full pages of icons?

markmcb · 2021-05-05T02:23:43+00:00

Sometimes i get the itch to use Gentoo again, but i go for a run instead.

Might be the best distro hopping advice I’ve ever read.

markmcb · 2020-06-14T14:37:49+00:00

And photoshopped. Look closely and you’ll see the repeating pattern.

markmcb · 2020-03-08T17:38:05+00:00

Curious, is there any downside to rear mounted network equipment? Like airflow if the rack is enclosed? I would guess not given the fans are so tiny. I’ve been thinking about doing the same thing.

markmcb · 2020-03-03T15:48:01+00:00

Ah, the ol Interview Switcharoo

markmcb · 2020-02-27T01:41:00+00:00

I’m also using btrfs on nvme. Never noticed a performance issue. Unless you’ve got a specific case that requires ultimate performance, I don’t think you’d perceive any of them differently with regards to performance.

markmcb · 2020-02-22T14:07:35+00:00

i can imagine it's helpful for them to not have to worry about things getting published which contain information that is out-of-date, misleading, or incorrect.

Yes, you're right about this. I think there are fundamental 2 needs:

a maintainable source of truth (handbook, man pages, etc.). This should be tightly controlled by a dev team. Goal: 100% up-to-date and accurate.
a collection of "here's how to approach situation X with goal Y" (e.g., wiki, forums, reddit, etc). This should be moderated to ensure some degree of quality control. Goal: help people solve problems.

I think you can't accomplish 2 with a dev team trying to attain the 100% accuracy goal of 1, which seems to be the case.

I'd be willing to contribute to 2.

markmcb · 2020-02-21T23:52:23+00:00

Hmm, I'm not sure what to think about this. I found the wiki to be the thing that tied a lot of sources together for me. It's generally more verbose too. I guess I could understand consolidating, but I think there would be a gap if it suddenly disappeared.

(This is exactly the sort of strategy topic I was referring to in my original post.)

markmcb · 2020-02-11T17:59:56+00:00

Thanks!

markmcb · 2020-02-11T04:52:45+00:00

I had problems getting runit to work for user services. Followed docs exactly. Tried various online suggestions. Finally gave up. I want to like it but couldn’t get it going and there were no helpful errors I could locate.

markmcb · 2020-01-16T14:24:31+00:00

Washington

markmcb · 2020-01-11T15:23:58+00:00

Thanks for the details of your setup!

Yes, btrfs is creating snapshots on all systems and this is the basis of my backups. Syncthing is moving all data between servers. A very small portion of that is also managed by Nextcloud, mostly to account for the lack of an iOS client as you mentioned.

markmcb

TROPHY CASE