Technology & MSG

FreeBSD Isn’t Dead But I’m Not Using it Anymore

May 10th, 2008 by Alex

After putting it off for a year or two, I invested in a small Dell PowerEdge (with a warranty) to replace the server that’s served this blog up from the beginning. In addition to faster dual-core CPUs, faster memory, and faster disks, I changed to a Linux-based operating system. This is a departure from the BSD-variant I’d been running for the past eight years.

Pull up your carpet square, because it’s time to step back in time.

Eight years ago I decided that I wanted to run my own web server to host photos. I had previously been paying for shared hosting from a commercial provider in Washington state but I wanted more access and more control of the system. I served a lot of files and video from my Windows NT 4 workstation at school, including the videos that would become the basis for the now very-public CollegeHumor.com. Shortly thereafter a friend introduced me to FreeBSD and I upgraded, thus beginning my foray into *nix systems.

I’d been running FreeBSD ever since and I couldn’t be happier with the performance of the system. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got no problems with the OS itself. It rocks and has consistently smoked Linux in my dinky and completely unscientific tests over the years. The change is mostly because of me. I’ve been using Linux-based systems at work for the past couple years and I’d rather be running something that I’m more current on.

Over the years I’ve been beige-boxing it, purchasing motherboard/memory combos and sticking my own drives in. I’ve been through two motherboards, three power supplies, fans galore, memory upgrades, and a lot of disk space. During that time my approach to OS upgrades was pretty damned poor. It it wasn’t broken or didn’t pose a risk to the system, I didn’t upgrade. To date I never performed a system-wide upgrade on the thing, meaning I was very out of date. Today FreeBSD 7 is the current version. Until last week I was running FreeBSD 4.7 which was released in October 2002. Seriously, the operating system was so old that new versions of most applications couldn’t be compiled from the ports tree because the ports tree itself dropped support for OS’ older than 5.0 a year or two ago. Even so, the system kept chugging along blissfully unaware that it was outdated. It lived in Rochester, New York even after I graduated, in the on-campus apartment of a friend who was staying an extra summer. When my friend left school the system was driven to the corporate offices of Take One Digital Media Works in Annapolis, Maryland where it lived for a year or so on a dedicated T1. Then due to the cost of doing business there, I moved onto a coworker’s business class SDSL line in his basement. While there I had a catastrophic motherboard failure that forced me onto temporary hardware for a week for it could be swapped for new hardware. Then my coworker moved to Arnold, Maryland, so the server moved from one basement to another, this time on business class FIOS which is extremely low latency and sickeningly fast. Since then we’ve moved from a shelf unit to a proper four-post rack, but otherwise it’s business as usual.

I don’t care if my system isn’t in a data center with biometric locks. I’m not that classy. I have no problem being in the basement.

Transitioning from ipfw to iptables has been a little bit of an adjustment, mostly for me. The transition from MySQL 3.2.23 to 5.X was amusing to say the least. There are still a few things to be tweaked, but for the most part the transition was pretty smooth. System downtime was 20-30 minutes at most with most people’s things coming back online immediately.

So farewell FreeBSD, it’s been a great eight years.