“Seriously? Again?” - “Hell yea, it was about time …”.
The Ubuntu Server distribution that has been running this server broke … again. Only a couple of months after I did a clean install, I dared to upgrade the system from 11.04 to 11.10, or at least I tried …
… unfortunately the machine turned out to be unreachable after the upgrade. So I had to physically log into my server just to find out the network was down, although the configuration didn’t change during the upgrade. A little debugging and a couple of reboots later, the network still wouldn’t start automatically - yet another incident in a series of Linux fails over the last year or so. Kubuntu desktop starts shipping version 4 and by that turns unusable. After switching to Ubuntu (and thereby Gnome), I had a sort-of working desktop system for a couple of months (I never liked Gnome, but it seriously was the better choice at the time). Then Ubuntu decides to drop Gnome in favour of something called “Unity”. An intersting approach, maybe a great choice on a netbook, but nothing more than a study on desktop concepts. After trying differnt flavours of Linux Mint and re-checking the current status of Kubuntu I’m now stuck with a broken Ubuntu for my Linux work, a Linux that is good enough to sshfs to my projects and do the actual desktop work on my MacBook.
Equipped with a great deal of frustration, not so much about the Linux kernel but the crappy userland and bad decisions made by distributors, I decided to step back a couple of years and install FreeBSD. Back in the days as a student I fiddled around with a couple of BSD flavours and had, among other things, an OpenBSD firewall and a FreeBSD file server. Eventually I decided against BSD back then, because I was experimenting with those systems a lot, mainly installing and uninstalling packages the whole day. This is something the ports collection, BSD’s preferred way of dealing with software packages, is not exactly helpful with. On the other hand, now I was looking for something well defined with as little maintenance as possible, so FreeBSD seemed like a natural choice.
The current system is running:
- FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE
- lighttpd
- Octopress
- No MySQL (PostgreSQL, …)
- No PHP
And here’s a list of things I like about the new setup:
- Installation of a base system leaves with just that, a base systems
- Output of ps aux fits on a single screen (including 8 lines getty)
- Output of netstat fits on a single screen
- Config files are where the package’s documentation claims they are
- Searching the web for a technical issues turns up actual results (not 30+ hits to forums filled with people complaining about their Linux not behaving like Windows)
- Updating the systems doesn’t require a reboot twice a week because a new kernel shipped
- many more little details that just make me happy :-)
