Somewhat related OpenBSD is the fundament of my self-hosted homelab since it runs DNS, DHCP, a firewall router and a small local web server. Configuration is a dream compared to Linux and probably even compared to FreeBSD. You just need to go through the FAQ and copy&paste the relevant examples and modify them as needed. I don't know why it's so complicated on Linux where you need to appease a handful of daemons and find your way through a labyrinth of config files. I run a separate Linux based KVM host though.
jimmaswell 35 minutes ago [-]
My impression is that the BSD's are laser-focused on providing efficient environments for networking backbone software to exist in, so special attention is paid to making it easy to orchestrate everything with rc.conf and keeping anything not required for these goals out of the default installation; while Linux (and its distributions) being far more general-purpose naturally will take more configuration.
noosphr 38 minutes ago [-]
OpenBSD is a very well kept secret that very few people are aware of. As close to nirvana as I can manage.
The fact I miss pretty much all the drama around the latest corporate take over attempts on Linux is just icing on the cake. The toxic slug strategy is an amazing one that more open source projects should use.
avhception 21 minutes ago [-]
I run FreeBSD in my homelab, too! One reason is the stellar ZFS support, but the simple fun of doing stuff differently is definitely a thing, too. And I like FreeBSD jails.
For me, the balance between all the overhead of the "cattle, not pets" approach and the manual way is the a README.md file for basic setup, and then having Ansible stand up the rest of the configuration. The host is configured as a Jail host, then individual services live inside the jails. Creating and configuring the jails is also done through Ansible.
Overall, I really like the setup.
I can individually SSH into each jail to allow easy debugging, I can snapshot the jails, and data lives on a special ZFS subvolume that I mount into each jail at "/bucket".
This way, I can throw away the jail at any time, fire up Ansible, and have everything up and running again in no time.
irusensei 4 hours ago [-]
Nice website design. I don't like to use the same stuff I use for work at home because home is supposed to be fun.
So I used to have everything FreeBSD but I've stopped using around 2020 when I've started buying computers that have different core configurations like ARM RockChip and Intel Alder Lake. I believe the term is called big.LITTLE when you have efficient and performance cores.
As of now the FreeBSD scheduler is not making full use of big.LITTLE. TBF It works and your mileage might vary and you might also pin stuff to cores but not ideal.
Meanwhile I went back to Linux and fell into the Nix rabbit hole.
I might go back once they get ULE to be able to use my Alder Lake efficiently.
fluffypony 4 hours ago [-]
I spent a lot of time 25 years ago learning to love BSD in general, but FreeBSD in particular. I tried to make DragonflyBSD my desktop OS for a time. It’s sad how little love BSD gets nowadays…especially given how much of modern iOS / macOS owes BSD (for BSD subsystem that’s on top of the Mach kernel).
wkat4242 4 hours ago [-]
I use it every day as my desktop OS. Vanilla FreeBSD even, not dragonfly.
I like it because it's so stable. They don't have this Linux thing where they have to change everything around to incorporate the latest fad, and there's also not so many big tech companies constantly messing with the code. Linux has too much corporate influence for me. I don't want Huawei or Amazon to be messing with the code I run all the time. The grassroots nature of Linux is kinda gone and the suits have taken over, just like with the internet itself.
I also love how the OS is stable but the apps are rolling. This really helps to be on the latest KDE etc. And the documentation is excellent. ZFS on root as a first class citizen too.
There's a small team of maintainers working hard to keep everything going in this age of increasing linuxisms. But so far they've been doing a great job.
elcritch 3 hours ago [-]
I really wish I could run FreeBSD on Apple silicon. The shared *BSD base seems fitting.
doublerabbit 2 hours ago [-]
I bought my iPhone out right in cash and we should have outright full access to the hardware. Not just the screen.
clanky 5 minutes ago [-]
Is this the fluffypony of Monero fame? If so, I got into FreeBSD a bit after hearing you praise it on crypto podcasts back in 2017/18. Surprised your handle was still available on HN!
adamddev1 3 hours ago [-]
I really wanted to love FreeBSD. Growing up in grade school my friend's older brother was a contributor and I thought he was the coolest guy ever. I loved the ethos and I agreed with this post. But practically, I just ran I into too much pain.
- firewall? Lots of pain and hard to find friendly, best practice starter templates. Wherever I looked, people said "it's complicated." After a lot of tinkering and learning I finally got a setup that was pretty safe. (I think.)
- pm2 was buggy on FreeBSD because of some issue with process IDs getting lost. That was pm2's fault, not FreeBSD's. But I still wanted to simply run different processes and keep my logs somewhere. Well, I guess I could write rc.d scripts for that. But keeping logs from the processes started by rc.d scripts? That also appeared to be a world of pain, and wherever I looked for answers people said "it's complicated."
In the end, it was just too much having to re-invent the wheel for common server tasks and I had to say goodbye. It's not you FreeBSD, it's me. I'm just not an OS dev.
laxd 3 hours ago [-]
- firewall?
PF seems to me like pretty much the most well regarded firewall there is -
with a nice, sensible DSL for config. If you don't like like it, you can use use IPFW or IPFILTER, which are alternative, built-in, firewall front-ends.
- In the end, it was just too much having to re-invent the wheel for common server tasks
Maybe you have built your routine around a system that have reinvented the wheel? I think FreeBSD knowledge degrades more slowly than that of Linux distros.
- I'm just not an OS dev.
That's how I feel when I enter the chaotic Linux world. Do you think my life revolve around keeping up with this shit? :)
hecifato 1 hours ago [-]
> That's how I feel when I enter the chaotic Linux world.
I feel that as a Linux user. I really like Linux, I use it on my desktop and it runs all my servers. Delving into forum posts to find some solution to a specific problem can be exhausting. Sometimes you get a top result from like 2011 and it is out of date so you then need to spend X minutes trying to look up something more recent.
laxd 1 hours ago [-]
Addendum:
I've used FreeBSD as my daily driver (I hate that term) since around 2004. Including through cs/math university. With Windows in a VM for "I need it".
The longer I've used it the more I'm annoyed by the trivialities of Linux distro management. And the bugs that happens between ill fitting parts composed by underfunded distro developers.
And I didn't mean to imply that FreeBSD is stale. There is big stuff happening continuously. Right now it's compatibility with Linux Wifi drivers, which will make FreeBSD more laptop-able. And pkgbase, which brings some of the compile-your-self flexibility of FreeBSD to binary management, and merges the two tools that decides what makes up your system into one. And kinda makes FreeBSD into the slim system that people already claims it to be.
My pet conspiracy is that pkgbase happened because the powers that be didn't want the 1000 battles to remove junk. Any time anyone wants to remove something there's always one or two guys on the mailing list claiming their livelihood depend on not having to do "pkg install Ø". With pkgbase its all gone.
antod 46 minutes ago [-]
They might've been trying freebsd back when pf wasn't well supported. Back when I last used openbsd (which might be nearly 20yrs ago now - eek), pf support on freebsd was lagging quite a bit.
Not sure what things are like now though - I'm guessing it's much better as pf was obviously the best option :)
laxd 32 minutes ago [-]
My non-investigated impression of thing:
* PF was imported into FreeBSD from OpenBSD, maybe it had problems at first.
* Both implementations have been actively maintained, further developed, and diverged.
* There is now collaboration in the development of the FreeBSD and OpenBSD implementations.
mrighele 1 hours ago [-]
> - firewall? Lots of pain and hard to find friendly, best practice starter templates. Wherever I looked, people said "it's complicated." After a lot of tinkering and learning I finally got a setup that was pretty safe. (I think.)
I don't use much FreeBSD these days, but pf (from OpenBSD, I know), is one of the best things since sliced bread.
In my first job I was working for a company selling a third-party vertical software and we were proving support for it. We were using a very expensive symantec vpn with most customers connecting with a 33.3kb phone connection, until we reached the license limits, and there was no money for new licenses. In a pinch, me and a coworker set up a new server with openvpn, freebsd, pf, and a ruby-based dns server that I don't remember anymore, and we grew an order of magnitudes more customers.
It's been more that 20 years, I still don't know how to use firewalls in linux, (there are many, I just pretend they don't exists) but I would still be able to setup a pf firewall if needed. I need to say it again, pf is a joy to use.
My gripe with FreeBSD right now is that I miss something like docker swarm. bhyve is fine but AFAIK it works only on a single host. Give me something that works on a bunch of hosts, and I will come back right away
undeveloper 4 minutes ago [-]
what do you need docker swarm / bhyve for in a selfhosting context?
SurceBeats 12 hours ago [-]
This really resonates. Sometimes the best reason to switch tech is just to feel that spark of learning again. I build self-hosting platforms and have spent years trying to make it “easy”, even getting it to work on Windows/macOS. But honestly, the magic isn’t in convenience. It’s in that figuring it out phase imho...
awesomecomment 59 minutes ago [-]
When we don't have convenience and rather jump into the sea directly, we would actually learn how the stack works and not how the convenience wrapper worked. We would feel more confident in our ability to do more things without requiring somebody else's help and more.
It is this reason why figuring out this phase feels really important and lovely even, yet most people feel its hardness and leave it aside since they just want something which just works
Fortunately, for them, I think with technologies like docker/podman, flatpak, appimage etc. I feel like its already easy-ish enough.
Side nit pick but I hate when apps create docker/podman containers when they can also have flatpak, I would love to see some self hosting apps which have a gui or maybe even some cli hosted via flatpak but I rarely saw cli apps in flatpak etc.
tombert 2 hours ago [-]
I still run a server for hosting my Jellyfin and n8n, but I've honestly been moving a lot of my stuff to cloud hosting stuff. I found that trying to maintain uptime for all my services started to become a pretty huge time sink and I realized that I really didn't gain anything by hosting my blog on my own server with Nginx instead of just using a free Cloudflare Pages with Quartz.
I think it's ultimately a sign of aging; I don't really have the attention span or energy to LARP as a sysadmin anymore, especially since I never really enjoyed that aspect of computers anyway. I think my monthly cost of storage would get untenable if I tried to move all my raw media rips to the cloud (about 45TB [1]), so I don't think I'll be able to migrate my Jellyfin for the foreseeable future, but I would like to some day.
[1] Looking it up, storing 45TB would end up costing anywhere between $250-$1500 a month pretty easily, which I currently cannot justify.
mk12 2 hours ago [-]
I installed Jellyfin on my home server a few months ago but it’s already broken by upgrading to 10.11, and unusable until I restore 10.10 from backup or start over: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/15027. There seem to be lots of other database migration bugs for this release and other ones.
tombert 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I've been afraid to upgrade because I've been following these updates. I'm going to wait until the dust settles a bit before upgrading because, as stated, I don't really enjoy larping as a sysadmin anymore.
itchingsphynx 1 hours ago [-]
I know the feeling, having recently migrated a solid TrueNAS 13.3 to a hand-built FreeBSD 13.5. The main reason was to get OpenZFS 2.3 RAIDZ expansion as storage was getting tight. It turns out to be quite similar using Webmin for GUI and BastilleBSD for jails.
There were a few hiccups, such as learning about bootloader versions, but after a few Saturdays tinkering it has been running solid and I’m very pleased.
jrmg 1 hours ago [-]
I recently set up an OpenBSD based router in our home and, man, it felt like a breath of fresh air.
I used FreeBSD as my daily desktop for a while in the 2000s. IIRC, the package manager had to compile each package from source, but that wasn't a huge deal. Things just worked in a non-overly-clever fashion.
elcritch 3 hours ago [-]
They added binary packages.
ne38 59 minutes ago [-]
Don't forget to set up toor user password!
/thin foil hat on
It's deliberate!
/thin foil hat off
echo7394 2 hours ago [-]
Why choose Free/OpenBSD instead of Debian, CentOS, or any other distro?
opentokix 2 hours ago [-]
Its fine to have fun with self-hosting.
The problem is when self-hosting amateur stuff leaks into professional life.
And then you have a expert beginner pushing their homelab/Self-hosting
TheRealPomax 2 hours ago [-]
If a single expert beginner can call the shots in your org, your org is the kind where that is absolutely fine.
opentokix 53 minutes ago [-]
It's more common than you think. Talking from 30 years of experience 20+ of them in very senior roles.
Rendered at 23:28:35 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The fact I miss pretty much all the drama around the latest corporate take over attempts on Linux is just icing on the cake. The toxic slug strategy is an amazing one that more open source projects should use.
For me, the balance between all the overhead of the "cattle, not pets" approach and the manual way is the a README.md file for basic setup, and then having Ansible stand up the rest of the configuration. The host is configured as a Jail host, then individual services live inside the jails. Creating and configuring the jails is also done through Ansible. Overall, I really like the setup. I can individually SSH into each jail to allow easy debugging, I can snapshot the jails, and data lives on a special ZFS subvolume that I mount into each jail at "/bucket". This way, I can throw away the jail at any time, fire up Ansible, and have everything up and running again in no time.
So I used to have everything FreeBSD but I've stopped using around 2020 when I've started buying computers that have different core configurations like ARM RockChip and Intel Alder Lake. I believe the term is called big.LITTLE when you have efficient and performance cores.
As of now the FreeBSD scheduler is not making full use of big.LITTLE. TBF It works and your mileage might vary and you might also pin stuff to cores but not ideal.
Meanwhile I went back to Linux and fell into the Nix rabbit hole.
I might go back once they get ULE to be able to use my Alder Lake efficiently.
I like it because it's so stable. They don't have this Linux thing where they have to change everything around to incorporate the latest fad, and there's also not so many big tech companies constantly messing with the code. Linux has too much corporate influence for me. I don't want Huawei or Amazon to be messing with the code I run all the time. The grassroots nature of Linux is kinda gone and the suits have taken over, just like with the internet itself.
I also love how the OS is stable but the apps are rolling. This really helps to be on the latest KDE etc. And the documentation is excellent. ZFS on root as a first class citizen too.
There's a small team of maintainers working hard to keep everything going in this age of increasing linuxisms. But so far they've been doing a great job.
- firewall? Lots of pain and hard to find friendly, best practice starter templates. Wherever I looked, people said "it's complicated." After a lot of tinkering and learning I finally got a setup that was pretty safe. (I think.)
- pm2 was buggy on FreeBSD because of some issue with process IDs getting lost. That was pm2's fault, not FreeBSD's. But I still wanted to simply run different processes and keep my logs somewhere. Well, I guess I could write rc.d scripts for that. But keeping logs from the processes started by rc.d scripts? That also appeared to be a world of pain, and wherever I looked for answers people said "it's complicated."
In the end, it was just too much having to re-invent the wheel for common server tasks and I had to say goodbye. It's not you FreeBSD, it's me. I'm just not an OS dev.
PF seems to me like pretty much the most well regarded firewall there is - with a nice, sensible DSL for config. If you don't like like it, you can use use IPFW or IPFILTER, which are alternative, built-in, firewall front-ends.
- In the end, it was just too much having to re-invent the wheel for common server tasks
Maybe you have built your routine around a system that have reinvented the wheel? I think FreeBSD knowledge degrades more slowly than that of Linux distros.
- I'm just not an OS dev.
That's how I feel when I enter the chaotic Linux world. Do you think my life revolve around keeping up with this shit? :)
I feel that as a Linux user. I really like Linux, I use it on my desktop and it runs all my servers. Delving into forum posts to find some solution to a specific problem can be exhausting. Sometimes you get a top result from like 2011 and it is out of date so you then need to spend X minutes trying to look up something more recent.
And I didn't mean to imply that FreeBSD is stale. There is big stuff happening continuously. Right now it's compatibility with Linux Wifi drivers, which will make FreeBSD more laptop-able. And pkgbase, which brings some of the compile-your-self flexibility of FreeBSD to binary management, and merges the two tools that decides what makes up your system into one. And kinda makes FreeBSD into the slim system that people already claims it to be.
My pet conspiracy is that pkgbase happened because the powers that be didn't want the 1000 battles to remove junk. Any time anyone wants to remove something there's always one or two guys on the mailing list claiming their livelihood depend on not having to do "pkg install Ø". With pkgbase its all gone.
Not sure what things are like now though - I'm guessing it's much better as pf was obviously the best option :)
* PF was imported into FreeBSD from OpenBSD, maybe it had problems at first.
* Both implementations have been actively maintained, further developed, and diverged.
* There is now collaboration in the development of the FreeBSD and OpenBSD implementations.
I don't use much FreeBSD these days, but pf (from OpenBSD, I know), is one of the best things since sliced bread.
In my first job I was working for a company selling a third-party vertical software and we were proving support for it. We were using a very expensive symantec vpn with most customers connecting with a 33.3kb phone connection, until we reached the license limits, and there was no money for new licenses. In a pinch, me and a coworker set up a new server with openvpn, freebsd, pf, and a ruby-based dns server that I don't remember anymore, and we grew an order of magnitudes more customers.
It's been more that 20 years, I still don't know how to use firewalls in linux, (there are many, I just pretend they don't exists) but I would still be able to setup a pf firewall if needed. I need to say it again, pf is a joy to use.
My gripe with FreeBSD right now is that I miss something like docker swarm. bhyve is fine but AFAIK it works only on a single host. Give me something that works on a bunch of hosts, and I will come back right away
Fortunately, for them, I think with technologies like docker/podman, flatpak, appimage etc. I feel like its already easy-ish enough.
Side nit pick but I hate when apps create docker/podman containers when they can also have flatpak, I would love to see some self hosting apps which have a gui or maybe even some cli hosted via flatpak but I rarely saw cli apps in flatpak etc.
I think it's ultimately a sign of aging; I don't really have the attention span or energy to LARP as a sysadmin anymore, especially since I never really enjoyed that aspect of computers anyway. I think my monthly cost of storage would get untenable if I tried to move all my raw media rips to the cloud (about 45TB [1]), so I don't think I'll be able to migrate my Jellyfin for the foreseeable future, but I would like to some day.
[1] Looking it up, storing 45TB would end up costing anywhere between $250-$1500 a month pretty easily, which I currently cannot justify.
There were a few hiccups, such as learning about bootloader versions, but after a few Saturdays tinkering it has been running solid and I’m very pleased.
I wrote about it here: https://www.blog.montgomerie.net/posts/2025-10-11-setting-up...
The problem is when self-hosting amateur stuff leaks into professional life.
And then you have a expert beginner pushing their homelab/Self-hosting