I've been using Linux since 1995, when I first downloaded Slackware and ran it on a used 486 that I cobbled together from Goodwill parts. By 1999 I'd bought a Pentium 3 and was running Debian as my daily driver -- finally had enough memory to run XFree86. At the same time I was running OpenBSD on home routers, working as my NAT gateway. I liked Linux as a desktop platform and BSD as a server platform. At the time both felt quite familiar, but OpenBSD seemed much more straightforward.
Over time I stopped using OpenBSD as commodity routers became easier to run vs. old desktops running 24/7 on the living room floor. It felt simpler getting OpenWRT running on an old Linksys. I kept my eye on OpenBSD over the years, but it was no longer a system I relied on. I used to know ipf and pf like the back of my hand -- these days I'd barely be able to put a firewall config together.
Fast forward: I'm still using Linux as my daily driver (arch, btw) and Linux has completely taken over at the workplace. systemd is now the norm. Debian, CentOS, it doesn't matter -- everything's running containers now so applications feel more contained. No longer are we downloading .tar.gz files and forgetting how they were compiled and installed.
But BSD was always kinda in the back of my mind. I missed it.
I live in the SFBA, near Berkeley, CA -- the home of BSD.
I decided to set up some BSD services again. This time I went with FreeBSD. First I started running some FreeBSD VMs for my mail server's main MX. That was fun. But I wanted to do more. I found a tutorial on installing FreeBSD on a bare metal machine at Hetzner. The simplicity of FreeBSD is a testament to making this type of "use a Linux rescue image to install FreeBSD" not only possible, but fairly simple.
This became the host bsd.peteftw.com.
I moved my inbound and outbound mail servers to this host using Bastille jails. It worked great -- postfix isn't that complicated, so I shouldn't have been surprised.
I then configured my homepage at peteftw.com/~pete to host this journal, since that felt familiarly nostalgic.
I migrated my finger service to FreeBSD and got it running.
I upgraded from FreeBSD 14 to FreeBSD 15. It was all so simple and straightforward.
The rc system is refreshingly easy to use. No need to create a jumble of .service files, .target files, .timer files. systemd is powerful, but sometimes it's just overkill. It's really nice being back on BSD.