Nowadays I build things so that they move and I have moved things about a bit so I know they work.

Mostly ~/apps/appname, where each appname has a docker compose file, and the data directories mounted under appname... I can compose down and (s)ftp the data out for hard archives or to move a site/service. I had been running a few VMs under a dedicated server, but switched to separate VPSes on OVH. Only gotcha with OVH is if you want to run mail, you want to avoid the local zone VMs that don't allow mail hosting.

YMMV

I was a bit rougher though: I just took a backup, then let my Hermes agent (Gemini 3.1 Pro) loose on it. It upgraded everything that needed to be upgraded, patched what needed to be patched, then proceeded to migrate everything to it's most recent equivalents. After that, a fair bit of server hardening was carried out followed by debloating of unused services. Likely would have continued to procrastinate doing this if it wasn't for AI support.

- PM2 was buggy on FreeBSD, which I used to manage my processes

- An alternative, using `rc.d` to run daemons was just so hard to get logs working.

- The firewall required too much self configuration to get it right with all the best security practices (ie. What does one do with ICMP.) I was missing something like a template with the defaults that come with UFW, for instance.

For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because it got security updates for a really long time. With minimal risk of breaking things on updates.

PS: after a bit of research Alma/Rocky Linux are probably the best choices for now. 10 years of support. But are they maintained well?

Note, I did try Artix, but when it broke last week after a restart (in which evidently something had gone wrong with an earlier kernel update), and I had to pull out a rescue ISO, I decided I didn't want to mess with that. I switched that machine to Devuan, but the jury is still out for me. I don't have any major complaints, but I'm still in the burn-in phase. :) I'm running Arch on a laptop, but they have been a bit hostile in the community with censorship, so I'm just waiting for a free weekend to blast it and put something else on. I don't want political drama in my software.

This all comes at an interesting time, though. This is the first time that I purchased a new laptop and didn't even let it boot into Windows, but instantly installed Linux. And everything "just worked". And now that I'm excited to try Linux, so many of the big players are embracing the steps to erode privacy (AI everywhere... age attestation/verification... telemetry on by default...). It's sad, and I'm just going to "nope" out of any interactions with them.

It used to be hard to find dedicated servers or VPSs with any of the BSDs, I think I settled on Panix.com or something?

Before that I remember some company called 15MinuteServers (NAC?) out of NJ I think that offered them. Just kind of rambling down memory lane at this point though.

Probably, it's because of ZFS ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache). It's similar to Linux's page cache, can be claimed back any moment and different tools name it differently: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

kqueue was a huge win too.

A huge thank you to the FreeBSD developers. I ran my first company for 15 years on FreeBSD with incredible uptime and resilience.

I've been using ZFS for about a decade on several systems and can't say enough good things about it: rock solid, feature rich and easy to use are the top benefits.

It really needs more love!

I just setup Semaphore the other night which adds a web UI to manage Ansible playbooks, it works like this:

1. I host my own Forgejo git repos

2. Semaphore is granted access to the Ansible repo

3. FreshRSS notifies me when a service I am running has new release

4. Check the release note, then run Semaphore to run the ansible-playbook

I could fully automate it all but I have the need to read release notes.

As for the OS, they are Debian 13 Netinst and fully local only, I could run them until the services can no longer run, which the ansible-playbook can spin up another LXC container running Debian 14 or whatever.

The goal is to automate everything as much as possible.

My guess would be that fastfetch probably reports actual memory usage while btop probably reports the total usage of all processes. The former is probably higher because of things like filesystem caching

The other Hail Mary reference is on top of HN today.

Well done Andy Weir.

Sleek like apple

Discoverable like android

Worksuitable like windows

Our usp is:?

The applications run just fine, but I don't even know where to start. Apparently I coded them directly into the server, no dev machine!

[0]: https://cdn.idiallo.com/images/assets/daily/98/old_servers.j...

It's an incredible journey to take--whether you stick with it or not. Migrating to FreeBSD gives you new eyes into what Linux was, is, and the awesomeness of FreeBSD that is so hard to articulate; like describing the color blue. It must be taken as a whole to appreciate it; and I'm not just saying the OS, it's commands, kernel features, but, the end-to-end compute experience, over time.

If I could draw an equivelent, it would be like when Djistrka savagely destroyed the GOTO statement with a single, short, paper. It took a brilliant mind to articulate that and there has yet to be such a mind to describe the beauty of FreeBSD. So, the best I can do, is just to challenge you to try it.