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Moving to FreeBSD

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90 pointsvezzy-fnord47 comments

I run FreeBSD 10 on my servers. Coming from a linux background it felt a bit odd at first.

- Like why am I not defaulted to a bash shell.

- Never did a cornshell activation before :) [virtuanenv/bin/activate.csh]

Within a few weeks of using bsd, I felt comfortable enough to guess where configuration files are kept based on BSD logic. From an engineering point of view, it feels well thought out.

With "pkg" similar to "apt-get" it is easy for beginners to transition into maintaining a bsd server.

Managing Jails with ez-admin simplifies jails quite a bit.

I keep some notes for myself here bsd for those who might be looking to try out freebsd > 10.

http://notes.busilogic.com/freebsd.html

To get immediate value for a linux user, I recommend trying jails and compare that to using Docker. It'd be interesting to hear other people's experiences.

Minor note: csh isn't cornshell, it's C Shell, because its syntax is somewhat c-like. Korn Shell is ksh, named after its creator, David Korn. A variant of ksh is what openbsd uses as their default user shell.

Does anyone actually use csh as a login shell anymore? Does Mac OS still use tcsh as the default?

Mac OS X has used an old version of bash for awhile now.

They forked the last GPLv2 release.

tcsh is the default for root on freebsd and should always be used when working as root.

why?

(t)csh is more likely available and the default on all Unix machines, which is the root of FreeBSD.

iirc, bash must be installed everywhere else and is not as readily available except on Linux.

Posix requires a bourne shell of some sort, not (t)csh, with a binary name of sh. Freebsd provides this through Ash. BSDs have traditionally provided a C-shell, with FreeBSD being one of the few that's kept csh as the default. OpenBSD uses pdksh, and NetBSD asks.

Posix is not Unix.

It's just best practice. This is what the FreeBSD-Documentation has to say about that topic:

"It is recommended that the root user's default shell remain unchanged since shells which are not included in the base distribution are installed to /usr/local/bin. In the event of a problem, the file system where /usr/local/bin is located may not be mounted. In this case, root would not have access to its default shell, preventing root from logging in and fixing the problem."

I guess there is nothing wrong with changing the default root shell to /bin/sh, but I don't know why anyone would like to do that.

Thanks for that correction. Coming from bash background, migrated to zsh on mac, I assumed c is for corn.

I find it odd to be put into a bash shell.

You don't need to guess where config files are. Unlike Linux, they're in the same place and documented in 'man hier'.

For my workstation, I don't have a need for jails (or Docker), so that's something a Linux user doesn't have to learn at first, or at all, if it's not important to them.

I meant to say, when I had projects to deploy, I found jails very convenient and would recommend trying it out.

FYI that cannot be read on my phone at all. These are the only two ways I can view it: http://m.imgur.com/a/TeEJg there is no way to see the text by scrolling or zooming

Thanks for the heads up.

Made it mobile friendly. Please refresh so you get the latest css.

Welcome to FreeBSD! I'm glad you like it!

By the way, you might regret mixing packages and ports unless you know what you're doing. If you're new to FreeBSD I'd recommend picking one or the other and not mixing.

I was told ports and pkg used the same database since FreeBSD 10?

I could be wrong, it was just an off-hand comment on the freenode irc channel.

They do, so one can meet the prereqs of another. But there are still issues that pop up. For instance, if you install a port with custom compile flags and then use pkg to upgrade it, you'll lose them. There are lots of little stuff like this that can pop up

The database isn't the problem but packages trail ports, cause they need to be tested first, so their dependencies may differ and cause issues. So mixing the two can cause an issue until you're experienced enough to know what to watch out for.

If you're machine can handle it, I'd just stay with ports.

Correct. More specifically, pkg-ng uses the same database as ports, and pkg-ng was made the default starting in 10. It was available in prior versions, but only opt-in and with a conversion process from the legacy package database to the newer one.

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/pkgng-intro.html

For anyone who's tried FreeBSD in the past (before pkg-ng) but ended up going back to Linux or OS X, I would highly recommend giving FreeBSD 10.x another shot. pkg(7) is a very well-designed and modern package management system, on par with Arch's pacman and superior to apt-get, in my opinion.

FreeBSD (4.7) was actually the first *nix I used. As a user operating system, I honestly might have been better served with a Linux distribution, but in retrospect FreeBSD still managed a lot of the end user aspects surprisingly well (Linux binary compatibility, NDIS driver wrappers, etc...).

I installed a FreeBSD (10) virtual machine this weekend to test a personal project, and a lot actually seems to have improved. I'm surprised they've already switched to Clang as a default compiler. Although, I think there are still some areas where FreeBSD might be a bit behind Linux.

I think what I still like about FreeBSD is that there seems to be a focus on simplicity and nothing seems to be added on a whim. Progress does seem to be a bit slower for certain things (kernel features, filesystem features, etc...), but as a whole a lot of the design decisions seem to be extremely well thought out.

The security section should mention that as of 2015, FreeBSD still does not have ASLR.

I am far from a blackhat/malware expert, but I've used enough ASLR exploits with ROP toys to win a few CTF's. I'm way too old to have any allegiance to BSD vs Linux vs POSIX{foo}. I say this to clarify my point - in the 90s I was a teenage-FreeBSD bigot; now, I don't give a hoot. To successfully manipulate the lack of memory address randomization (i.e., attack via ASLR), one either either has a target running BIND circa 1999 that will let you smash the stack and 'sploit da EIP remotely, or the malicious attacker has a local, non-jailed shell. At which point you have far more to worry about than ASLR. DEP and ASLR are effective (especially with doing interesting things more advanced than just swapping on a ROP gadget - JIT stream exploits are _very clever_) but I'd take the out-of-the-box FreeBSD over any distro of Linux out-of-the-box for security.

To be honest, FreeBSD lack so many other modern features that barely makes it usable. (Properly working)NUMA? Virtualization? Yes, I'm fully aware about work in progress.

And yet Netflix chose FreeBSD over Linux to serve about 40% of all internet traffic, as does WhatsApp.

Since when Netflix accounts for 40% of internet traffic?

Netflix video accounts for over 40% of all internet traffic, yes.

See for example http://time.com/3901378/netflix-internet-traffic/ Note that the metric is actually downstream peak time consumer ISP traffic which is a little different than "40% of the Internet," but the fact remains that Netflix is using FreeBSD to serve a phenomenal amount of traffic.

If you think someone may be saying something ridiculous, please reread carefully in a charitable manner (charity was not even required here).

FreeBSD supports being run as Xen dom0, has OS-level virtualization through jails, the bhyve hypervisor and can run as a VirtualBox host. I'm thus not sure what you mean by a lack of virtualization.

Touché on NUMA. How this makes FreeBSD "barely usable" is beyond me.

There is a working ASLR patchset for FreeBSD.

https://hardenedbsd.org/article/shawn-webb/2015-07-06/announ...

So if you want ASLR you can have it. It's just not yet in a regular FreeBSD release.

Really nice summary! If you really want to make your life with ports easier, I highly recommend Poudriere (https://github.com/freebsd/poudriere). Poudriere can build your ports collection for one or more machines running any version of FreeBSD that's <= of the Poudriere hosts. After you configure your ports, you can easily archive all of the options you've set (e.g. should want/need to move your Poudriere setup elsewhere).

I run Poudriere on my home server, and then I point pkg to a local Nginx server. Every night, it builds the latest versions of all of the ports I use, and I can simply type "pkg upgrade" any time I want. For work, I run a Poudriere server on an EC2 instance to build packages for a variety of configurations. Depending on your needs, you could pretty easily have an EC2 instance that remains shutdown most of the time, and then on some sort of schedule you spin it up, build the latest, publish your packages, and shut down again.

I'd want to switch if I used Gentoo as well. Sounds like this guy is sick of rolling his own Linux, not sick of Linux.

The next cheap ssd I get, I'm going to install pcbsd and give it a go.

Just moved to PCBSD 10.2 with Lumina desktop. No regrets.

That's encouraging!

Why isn't FreeBSD suitable for a personal computer / desktop? I'm curious why you choose PC-BSD.

it's too mainstream

PC-BSD is essentially a sibling of FreeBSD that is designed to be much more friendly for a desktop install. It's what a lot of FreeBSD devs even recommend for someone starting to look into the BSDs for the first time, as it has graphical installers and other friendly, useful bits that the more server-oriented FreeBSD doesn't have.

Just to expand a little on Sanddancer's reply, PC-BSD is FreeBSD, but with a friendlier installer, and comes with X11 and a window manager installed and set up for you. It is designed to get FreeBSD installed as a desktop system quicker and more easily than installing straight FreeBSD and then installing everything else on top of that. So, it is similar to how Ubuntu was to Debian back when Ubuntu first came out.

As explained below by others. I used headless FreeBSD for years with servers, but for the desktop move I chose PCBSD because it wraps it up neatly. My desktop needs are pretty simple though.

Besides the facts that Sanddancer and thelibrarian already mentioned, I as a FreeBSD desktop user would like to answer the question in a different way.

> Why isn't FreeBSD suitable for a personal computer / desktop?

Next time you are visiting a BSDCon have a look around. What are the Systems FreeBSD devs are working with and what are the Systems OpenBSD devs are working with? It is not my intention to be polemic, but I think you will see that many FreeBSD devs (in contrast to many OpenBSD devs) are too pragmatic to use their own OS on their desktop and just use OS X.

At least that is my theory, why OpenBSD make a nicer desktop than FreeBSD -- as long as you don't need any FreeBSD features.

“Then came the systemd controversy. I'm sick of talking about it, so let's skip that part. I decided to look into other operating systems. Linux isn't the only UNIX-like OS out there, after all.”

I would like to read what he actually has against systemd, but could only find a complaint from two months ago that he was forced to learn /bin/ip when ifconfig was unavailable. This, to me, seems like someone simply unilling to move with the times.

FreeBSD is fine for a single-user system with no expectations of security. Given the number of trivially exploitable kernel issues it has, it's absolutely terrible for a server, shared hosting or any kind of multi-user environment.

Moreover, unlike Linux, there is no grsecurity patch to harden it.

What?

> FreeBSD is fine for a single-user system with no expectations of security. Given the number of trivially exploitable kernel issues it has, it's absolutely terrible for a server, shared hosting or any kind of multi-user environment. Moreover, unlike Linux, there is no grsecurity patch to harden it.

Quoted for troollth.

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