Using More FreeBSD 17 Nov 2023

I do some volunteer sysadmining for a local non-profit, mostly network management and related things. Between there, and my home setup, I have gradually moved from defaulting to Ubuntu back towards FreeBSD over the last year. Nothing wrong with Ubuntu, but I kept finding FreeBSD to simply be a little bit easier and a lot better documented. For a dev box, I'll stick with linux—all the tooling optimizes there first, in particular the container ecosystem is too useful to walk away from. For sysadmin'y stuff though, FreeBSD is where it's at. At a minimum, it's rc system is much easier to work with than systemd :-)

My general toolkit for running anything is a pair of refurbished HP Prodesks sharing a CARP virtual interface using devd events if I need to do anything on failover. It's shockingly easy and just works.

(side note: I tested 14.0-RELEASE on a pair of them and discovered that if a server is hosting a VIP and needs to to use that virtual IP when it is the backup, say to find DNS, you need to disable net.inet.ip.source_address_validation in sysctl, but then it works fine. I probably shouldn't do this, but I'll sort that out later.)

(side note 2: With those old HP Prodesks, you need to go into the BIOS and disable UEFI (switch to use "legacy boot" for the FreeBSD install to work). You don't need to for Ubuntu.)