[HN Gopher] Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again
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Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 155 points
Date : 2025-11-02 11:01 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jsteuernagel.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (jsteuernagel.de)
| SurceBeats wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fluffypony wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I really wish I could run FreeBSD on Apple silicon. The
| shared *BSD base seems fitting.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I bought my iPhone out right in cash and we should have
| outright full access to the hardware. Not just the screen.
| irusensei wrote:
| 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.
| sehugg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They added binary packages.
| adamddev1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| - 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 make FreeBSD into the slim
| system that people already claim 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 O". With pkgbase its all gone.
| Try to keep up.
| antod wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My non-investigated impression of thing: * PF was imported
| into FreeBSD from OpenBSD, maybe it had problems at first.
| * Both implementations has been actively maintained,
| further developed, and diverged. * There is now solid
| collaboration in the development between the developers of
| FreeBSD and OpenBSD implementations.
| mrighele wrote:
| > - 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
| opentokix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If a single expert beginner can call the shots in your org,
| your org is the kind where that is absolutely fine.
| opentokix wrote:
| It's more common than you think. Talking from 30 years of
| experience 20+ of them in very senior roles.
| tombert wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| 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.
| noosphr wrote:
| 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.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| 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.
| echo7394 wrote:
| Why choose Free/OpenBSD instead of Debian, CentOS, or any other
| distro?
| jrmg wrote:
| I recently set up an OpenBSD based router in our home and, man,
| it felt like a breath of fresh air.
|
| I wrote about it here:
| https://www.blog.montgomerie.net/posts/2025-10-11-setting-up...
| itchingsphynx wrote:
| 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.
| ne38 wrote:
| Don't forget to set up toor user password! /thin foil hat on It's
| deliberate! /thin foil hat off
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