While you're here, have you donated[0][1] yet? :) You may or may not be aware, but FreeBSD runs your movies on Netflix, your games on PlayStation 4 and Nitendo Switch, your files on FreeNAS and ZFS, your friends on WhatsApp and OpenBSD runs everything else on OpenSSH. ;)
So, you may or may not know that, but you need FreeBSD and OpenBSD and they also need you! Every cent counts and so does every contributor, that helps the foundations keep their non-profit status.
> [...] have you donated? [...]
> FreeBSD runs your movies on Netflix, your games on PlayStation 4 and Nitendo Switch
This really isn't how this should work. If one uses Netflix or some gaming hardware (for which one payed) one should not feel obligated in any way to give to FreeBSD. The Netflix or Nintendo might want to donate to ensure they have an even better system available in the future, but because of the BSD license, they aren't obligated either.
That aside, as a personal FreeBSD user, I have actually donated to the FreeBSD foundation every year for the last four or five years and plan to do it again this year.
Yes, Netflix, Sony and Nintendo should donate. And guess what, where did they get the money to donate? From US: customers! So we already donated indirectly.
... and although many of the core team had agreeable sentiments in the very long discussion that followed, nothing at all has changed.
The poster is correct - there is indeed no point in using the 10.x branch. What he doesn't know is that there has been no point in using the 10.x branch for over a year now[1] but since the 11 release was at "dot zero" you were ill-advised to use that as well. This means that for over a year there has been no good answer to the question "which version of FreeBSD should I use".
In summary:
FreeBSD is an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers. It is very difficult to invest time and money into FreeBSD because the platform is neither stable[2] nor long-term. Finally, FreeBSD, possibly unwittingly, loses a lot of end-user development and reinvestment since end users are never working on the same OS that the developers are.[3]
[1] As usual, all new drivers and non-critical bug-fixes go to 11, since that is what "is current" and nobody bothers backporting any of it to 10. This was true even before 11.0-RELEASE came out.
[2] I don't mean stable in terms of reliability - FreeBSD is rock solid and we trust all of rsync.net to it - I am speaking of the stability of the OS platform itself and what functions it is capable of.
[3] I'm not interested in your success stories running CURRENT in production. The official stance of the FreeBSD project is that CURRENT "includes works in progress, experimental changes, and transitional mechanisms". They go on: "FreeBSD-CURRENT is not in any way “officially supported".
This means that for over a year there has been no good answer to the question "which version of FreeBSD should I use".
Not true at all. The answer is:
1. If you have systems which are already running 10.x, you should run the latest 10.x release.
2. If you're deploying a new system now, you should deploy it with the latest 11.x release.
3. If you're building a product which you will be selling next year, you should build it on top of FreeBSD HEAD, so that it will be running a recent release when it ends up being deployed.
Old STABLE branches get updates and new releases because there are deployed systems which are using them. Think of 10.3 as "FreeBSD 10, service pack 3".
I've been using FreeBSD since the late 4.x days and I really don't feel the same way. It's always been the same rule of thumb as far as I'm concerned, "try to avoid x.0 releases and don't upgrade to the newer version as long as you don't need a new feature and the n-1 is still supported".
It's also generally very conservative with its feature set, unstable and experimental features are generally very clearly labeled and are not marked as stable until actually stable.
You're a power user and you follow the development of FreeBSD extremely closely and you're frustrated that you have to wait 10 months for a feature to make it into a release. That's understandable. I on the other hand use FreeBSD as some kind of 'install and forget' OS. It's stable, it Just Works and I just need to remember to run freebsd-update from time to time.
>FreeBSD is an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers.
I see your point but I'll take that over what seems to be the mindset of most Linux distros these days, "let's dumb everything down and hide everything behind mountains of crappy abstractions to cater to the mythical 'average desktop user' who doesn't even use or care about our OS anyway".
FreeBSD has a very good documentation but it doesn't attempt to dumb things down and assumes a certain level of technical knowledge from its users. I think understanding the release cycle is part of that, all the information is out there, it's up to you to decide what's good for you. CURRENT, release, oldrelease, they all have their use case.
Another issue is that, at least in my experience, the upgrade experience can be a bit fraught. Especially if you're using packages. I've been using FreeBSD intermittently since somewhere around 1997 or 1998, so I'm not a complete n00b. But I've had enough instances where an upgrade hosed something important that I'm hesitant to upgrade until I'm sure I'll have time to troubleshoot fix something weird and new. And this of course ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy because the longer I wait to upgrade, the more likely stuff is to break.
I don't think I'm an idiot, but sometimes FreeBSD makes me feel like one. (This is, of course, in contrast to OpenBSD where the software may not make me feel like an idiot, but the developers do.)
I agree with your observations, but I'm not sure that I agree that this is a huge problem; but maybe I've been using FreeBSD differently than you have.
At my current employer, and the previous, we used FreeBSD for its base OS, and then most of the services we ran were our own proprietary code, built with in-house patches on top of an open source language. We didn't and don't tend to upgrade the OS unless a release (or a patch) fixes a specific issue we're seeing, or is a security issue in things we actually use, but new hardware tends to get the latest OS (we're currently installing 10.3, but may consider 11.1 now that it's out; we do have a couple machines running 11.0 because they need the per disk io threads and fixes to directio that i think were in 11 as well). When we run into problems, we'll look to see if it has been fixed in upstream, and see if we can apply that to the whatever release we're currently using. If not, we try to fix it ourselves, and then offer the fix back; but we're happy to run with our version of the fix until it makes it upstream.
We've had pretty good luck with upgrades not causing major issues, but we did have some trouble with mrsas drivers for a while, and the VM change in 10.x where pages are marked inactive and can get swapped out without memory pressure caused us a lot of trouble until we figured it out.
The benefit of the lengthy release process is that the releases are pretty solid, and once a system is setup, we don't have to touch it. Also, because FreeBSD doesn't change for the sake of it, we don't usually have to worry about some systems being on 9.x, some on 10.x, and some on 11.x; we just are sure to build software either on the hosts themselves, or on an older system, so it'll run on all systems.
Edit to add: The most frustrating thing for me are the many Bugzilla entries for issues that I'm having, with patches, that are sitting there for years. For example this one https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=25986 which was open for 14 years before it became CVE-2015-5358
While I disagree with your point of view, I understand that you may perceive things like that. However, the problem is very simple: vast majority of work done in FreeBSD is being done by unpaid volunteers, unlike in case of RHEL/Fedora/Centos and Ubuntu/Debian. The solution to this problem is also very simple: donate money to the project with that particular request. Once enough money is donated, the project can deliver what users like you are asking for, by hiring engineers to work on it. I don't know if you have or have not donated money to the project, but looking at FreeBSDFoundation donors list I can't see rsync.net there ;) So, everything is in your hands!
As ambiguous as the current situation is, at least they've fixed the situation where there were five point versions marked as "production" on the website.
>FreeBSD is an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers. It is very difficult to invest time and money into FreeBSD because the platform is neither stable[2] nor long-term
While I don't want to dismiss you... The number of extremely profitable companies that built their products on top of freebsd tells me you're completely off base with your opinion.
Just off the top of my head: netapp ONTAP, emc isilon onefs, juniper Junos, Sony PlayStation, ixsystems, pfsense, Netflix, Intel, etc.
That's a really good point. Have any of the branches tried to address this? There's nothing stopping anybody from making a branch that does sane versioning & maintenance.
This release also finally compiles NAT-T into the kernel by default. I can finally run a strongswan/ikev2 server without needing to compile a kernel just for nat traversal. woohoo!
I use IPSec for my VPN needs (accessing my stuff at home from remote places mainly) and run FreeBSD. Getting it set up was annoying, to say the least.
I have no idea why they didn't include NAT-T by default in 11.0. I'd hazard a guess that most VPN connections involve at least one end being behind NAT.
Since I'm not an expert, I went with FreeNAS. It's largely "ready to go" out of the box, and having a GUI makes things very discoverable. Even if you're comfortable with CLI tools, you might not be familiarized with all the tools used in a typical NAS setup. Heck, you might not have much devops experience, which could lead to overlooking a key detail, such as setting up regularly scheduled scrub and SMART tests and having it email you if anything requires your attention.
Even if you're well versed on these topics, I'd still suggest trying it out on a VM, or at least reading through their guides. Seeing the approach taken by someone else might help you refine your own setup.
Unfortunately, the last few months haven't been great for FreeNAS. They had a horribly botched release. It was killed off fairly quickly, but a few people got burned over it. The good news is that they changed their mind on their expected breaking changes. Initially they intended to kill off jails in favor of docker, which made it a painful upgrade process for some existing users. From an outsider's perspective, it looked rush. Even though I'm happy with my setup, it made me a little more weary about quickly adopting major upstream changes.
"If I'm comfortable using command line tools, should I just use FreeBSD and ZFS directly to build a NAS, or should I go with FreeNAS?
I assume that using version 11.1 is the way to go? No point in using the 10.x branch?"
I would build the NAS using plain old FreeBSD and I would indeed use 11.1.
If it were a week ago, I would have advised 10.3 as, historically, x.0 releases of FreeBSD have been ill-advised.
If you are comfortable on the command line I see no reason to use FreeNAS/TrueNAS.
This is how I run my home fileserver. It is also how I/we run all of rsync.net - ZFS filesystems on top of plain old FreeBSD.
I built a NAS with base FreeBSD, because I am comfortable with the command line, and didn't need a gui solution. Not much to report -- it works great.
If you go with plain FreeBSD, yes...go with 11.1. No point using the 10.x branch unless you have some specific reason to (eg. some specific legacy support requirements or something).
I've been using FreeBSD as a NAS with ZFS since ZFS was first added. I love it! The man pages are fantastic, the FreeBSD handbook is amazing, and the whole system feels really cohesive and well-designed.
I use Arch Linux on my desktop but I would switch to FreeBSD in a heartbeat if it addressed the desktop-related issues I had last time I tried it. It would be especially amazing if they fixed all the sleep and power management stuff so it could be used on a laptop with good battery life.
One important thing, that is not pointed out yet: FreeNAS has easy upgrade path for major OS versions. That is something that I miss when running plain FreeBSD.
Plus, you can always switch between plain and FreeNAS installation.
It mainly depends on what you are trying to achieve and whether you consider that time worthwhile.
They are both great options and FreeNAS already gives you a lot of flexibility.
It's a bit like with a router. Do you use something along the lines OpenWRT and mainly log in to the command line, not because you have to, but because you can then you might want to go with FreeBSD and ZFS.
However, if you don't know if it is flexible enough and fits: Go with FreeNAS and fall back to FreeBSD. I think that's the best option for most people.
I've been using FreeNAS for over two years and I would hate to try to use plain FreeBSD. FreeNAS is, as they say, "batteries included". If you're specifically setting up a NAS, I can't imagine why you would want to do more work for apparently little benefit.
For home use FreeBSD+ZFS will leave more control in your hands. For a (stable) filesystem node If I were you, I'd let others debug the latest release and just use 10.3. Or at least lag the latest release by a few months to a year or so.
You're comfortable with CLI tools, but there are other considerations. Do you like "appliances"? How much do you value "stability" as in running old stuff?
I would recommend HardenedBSD 12-CURRENT but maybe that's just me :D
I'm interested in what people think. For me, I'd be inclined to go FreeBSD as I perceive it to be more standard. If you're actually using either branch you had better be great at the cli.
Anybody know what the deal with blacklistd is? I googled and finally found the man page, but it's not immediately apparent why one might choose using it over using something like fail2ban (which works for any service and can block all ports, not just ssh)?
It listens on a socket for failed login notifications from other daemons. I'd say this approach is better than what fail2ban does (scans logs with regexps), but it has to be supported upstream so the daemons actually notify blacklistd.
[+] [-] tachion|8 years ago|reply
So, you may or may not know that, but you need FreeBSD and OpenBSD and they also need you! Every cent counts and so does every contributor, that helps the foundations keep their non-profit status.
[0] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/
[1] https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html
[+] [-] lorenzfx|8 years ago|reply
This really isn't how this should work. If one uses Netflix or some gaming hardware (for which one payed) one should not feel obligated in any way to give to FreeBSD. The Netflix or Nintendo might want to donate to ensure they have an even better system available in the future, but because of the BSD license, they aren't obligated either.
That aside, as a personal FreeBSD user, I have actually donated to the FreeBSD foundation every year for the last four or five years and plan to do it again this year.
[+] [-] harry8|8 years ago|reply
While you're here what did they donate?
[+] [-] asiekierka|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yingbo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|8 years ago|reply
"I assume that using version 11.1 is the way to go? No point in using the 10.x branch?"
... and that is everything that is wrong with FreeBSD - and has been for over ten years.
I wrote a long critique of this issue in 2012 that you can read in the mailing list archives:
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-Jan...
... and although many of the core team had agreeable sentiments in the very long discussion that followed, nothing at all has changed.
The poster is correct - there is indeed no point in using the 10.x branch. What he doesn't know is that there has been no point in using the 10.x branch for over a year now[1] but since the 11 release was at "dot zero" you were ill-advised to use that as well. This means that for over a year there has been no good answer to the question "which version of FreeBSD should I use".
In summary:
FreeBSD is an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers. It is very difficult to invest time and money into FreeBSD because the platform is neither stable[2] nor long-term. Finally, FreeBSD, possibly unwittingly, loses a lot of end-user development and reinvestment since end users are never working on the same OS that the developers are.[3]
[1] As usual, all new drivers and non-critical bug-fixes go to 11, since that is what "is current" and nobody bothers backporting any of it to 10. This was true even before 11.0-RELEASE came out.
[2] I don't mean stable in terms of reliability - FreeBSD is rock solid and we trust all of rsync.net to it - I am speaking of the stability of the OS platform itself and what functions it is capable of.
[3] I'm not interested in your success stories running CURRENT in production. The official stance of the FreeBSD project is that CURRENT "includes works in progress, experimental changes, and transitional mechanisms". They go on: "FreeBSD-CURRENT is not in any way “officially supported".
[+] [-] cperciva|8 years ago|reply
Not true at all. The answer is:
1. If you have systems which are already running 10.x, you should run the latest 10.x release.
2. If you're deploying a new system now, you should deploy it with the latest 11.x release.
3. If you're building a product which you will be selling next year, you should build it on top of FreeBSD HEAD, so that it will be running a recent release when it ends up being deployed.
Old STABLE branches get updates and new releases because there are deployed systems which are using them. Think of 10.3 as "FreeBSD 10, service pack 3".
[+] [-] simias|8 years ago|reply
It's also generally very conservative with its feature set, unstable and experimental features are generally very clearly labeled and are not marked as stable until actually stable.
You're a power user and you follow the development of FreeBSD extremely closely and you're frustrated that you have to wait 10 months for a feature to make it into a release. That's understandable. I on the other hand use FreeBSD as some kind of 'install and forget' OS. It's stable, it Just Works and I just need to remember to run freebsd-update from time to time.
>FreeBSD is an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers.
I see your point but I'll take that over what seems to be the mindset of most Linux distros these days, "let's dumb everything down and hide everything behind mountains of crappy abstractions to cater to the mythical 'average desktop user' who doesn't even use or care about our OS anyway".
FreeBSD has a very good documentation but it doesn't attempt to dumb things down and assumes a certain level of technical knowledge from its users. I think understanding the release cycle is part of that, all the information is out there, it's up to you to decide what's good for you. CURRENT, release, oldrelease, they all have their use case.
[+] [-] zippergz|8 years ago|reply
I don't think I'm an idiot, but sometimes FreeBSD makes me feel like one. (This is, of course, in contrast to OpenBSD where the software may not make me feel like an idiot, but the developers do.)
[+] [-] toast0|8 years ago|reply
At my current employer, and the previous, we used FreeBSD for its base OS, and then most of the services we ran were our own proprietary code, built with in-house patches on top of an open source language. We didn't and don't tend to upgrade the OS unless a release (or a patch) fixes a specific issue we're seeing, or is a security issue in things we actually use, but new hardware tends to get the latest OS (we're currently installing 10.3, but may consider 11.1 now that it's out; we do have a couple machines running 11.0 because they need the per disk io threads and fixes to directio that i think were in 11 as well). When we run into problems, we'll look to see if it has been fixed in upstream, and see if we can apply that to the whatever release we're currently using. If not, we try to fix it ourselves, and then offer the fix back; but we're happy to run with our version of the fix until it makes it upstream.
We've had pretty good luck with upgrades not causing major issues, but we did have some trouble with mrsas drivers for a while, and the VM change in 10.x where pages are marked inactive and can get swapped out without memory pressure caused us a lot of trouble until we figured it out.
The benefit of the lengthy release process is that the releases are pretty solid, and once a system is setup, we don't have to touch it. Also, because FreeBSD doesn't change for the sake of it, we don't usually have to worry about some systems being on 9.x, some on 10.x, and some on 11.x; we just are sure to build software either on the hosts themselves, or on an older system, so it'll run on all systems.
Edit to add: The most frustrating thing for me are the many Bugzilla entries for issues that I'm having, with patches, that are sitting there for years. For example this one https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=25986 which was open for 14 years before it became CVE-2015-5358
[+] [-] tachion|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmspring|8 years ago|reply
And having used FreeBSD for nearly 18 years now, there have certainly been hiccups, but for the uses I have had 9 and 10 were perfectly usable.
[+] [-] kchoudhu|8 years ago|reply
That was definitely a low point for the Project.
Edit: Ha! It looks like we have this conversation every time there's a new release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12368914
[+] [-] tw04|8 years ago|reply
While I don't want to dismiss you... The number of extremely profitable companies that built their products on top of freebsd tells me you're completely off base with your opinion.
Just off the top of my head: netapp ONTAP, emc isilon onefs, juniper Junos, Sony PlayStation, ixsystems, pfsense, Netflix, Intel, etc.
[+] [-] ianai|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tw04|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stock_toaster|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mister_Snuggles|8 years ago|reply
I have no idea why they didn't include NAT-T by default in 11.0. I'd hazard a guess that most VPN connections involve at least one end being behind NAT.
[+] [-] kchoudhu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aduitsis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rleigh|8 years ago|reply
Many thanks to all the FreeBSD crew for all their hard work.
[+] [-] PhantomGremlin|8 years ago|reply
I assume that using version 11.1 is the way to go? No point in using the 10.x branch?
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|8 years ago|reply
Even if you're well versed on these topics, I'd still suggest trying it out on a VM, or at least reading through their guides. Seeing the approach taken by someone else might help you refine your own setup.
Unfortunately, the last few months haven't been great for FreeNAS. They had a horribly botched release. It was killed off fairly quickly, but a few people got burned over it. The good news is that they changed their mind on their expected breaking changes. Initially they intended to kill off jails in favor of docker, which made it a painful upgrade process for some existing users. From an outsider's perspective, it looked rush. Even though I'm happy with my setup, it made me a little more weary about quickly adopting major upstream changes.
Go with FreeNAS 11.
[+] [-] rsync|8 years ago|reply
I would build the NAS using plain old FreeBSD and I would indeed use 11.1.
If it were a week ago, I would have advised 10.3 as, historically, x.0 releases of FreeBSD have been ill-advised.
If you are comfortable on the command line I see no reason to use FreeNAS/TrueNAS.
This is how I run my home fileserver. It is also how I/we run all of rsync.net - ZFS filesystems on top of plain old FreeBSD.
[+] [-] stock_toaster|8 years ago|reply
If you go with plain FreeBSD, yes...go with 11.1. No point using the 10.x branch unless you have some specific reason to (eg. some specific legacy support requirements or something).
[+] [-] chongli|8 years ago|reply
I use Arch Linux on my desktop but I would switch to FreeBSD in a heartbeat if it addressed the desktop-related issues I had last time I tried it. It would be especially amazing if they fixed all the sleep and power management stuff so it could be used on a laptop with good battery life.
[+] [-] toddnni|8 years ago|reply
Plus, you can always switch between plain and FreeNAS installation.
[+] [-] tete|8 years ago|reply
They are both great options and FreeNAS already gives you a lot of flexibility.
It's a bit like with a router. Do you use something along the lines OpenWRT and mainly log in to the command line, not because you have to, but because you can then you might want to go with FreeBSD and ZFS.
However, if you don't know if it is flexible enough and fits: Go with FreeNAS and fall back to FreeBSD. I think that's the best option for most people.
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bakul|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floatboth|8 years ago|reply
I would recommend HardenedBSD 12-CURRENT but maybe that's just me :D
[+] [-] ianai|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alwillis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xbear|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SwellJoe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petre|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlgaddis|8 years ago|reply
To me, it seems kinda novel but I can't see myself ever using it across my production servers.
[+] [-] emaste|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vermaden|8 years ago|reply
# kldload cpuctl # powermon
Also for power management, powerdxx (from Ports) is better then powerd:/etc/rc.conf powerdxx_enable=YES powerdxx_flags="-n hiadaptive -a hiadaptive -b hiadaptive -m 1600 -M 3000"
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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