hello. Mac guy here trying to plan a transition to a rackmount freebsd server

this is kind of a hardware question (i think) but still relevant. If I get an old HP server with SATA drive bays, but no M.2 slots, and I get a PCI M.2 carrier, will that be bootable? Or do you need something special to make it bootable like you do on Macs/macOS?

GoSox: what do you mean by "carrier"? if it's just an M.2 NVMe slot on a PCIe card, it *should* be bootable, but this depends entirely on your hardware, or more specifically firmware -- older firmware (BIOS) simply doesn't have the support to bootstrap from NVMe

yes a PCIe card with ideally 2 or 3 M.2 slots on it, thats probably what I'd be going for

it could be the firmware supports NVMe boot even if the hardware doesn't include M.2 slots, though, those are not necessarily tied together

the only way to know for sure is to simply try it, but in case it doesn't work, you could work around it by installing FreeBSD on the NVMe, then configuring a spare SATA disk to contain the EFI partition and nothing else, which would load FreeBSD from the NVMe

that allows the firmware to load the FreeBSD loader from the SATA disk

hrmmm

the ability to boot from the m.2, does that "feature" have a name? In other words, if I have the full spec sheet for the server, is there something in there that might tell me?

off hand i don't know -- i don't think there's a specific term but it might be called something like "NVMe boot"

ok

unfortunately, even in enterprise hardware, vendors tend not to document this sort of low-level feature very well

because they assume you'll use the hardware shipped with the system -> no M.2 slots -> no need to mention NVMe boot

even if they might still have included that feature in the firmware

yeah

i'm looking at old stock HP ProLiant systems and their specs are just what i need, including price. EXCEPT I really want an M.2 boot drive for the fastest possible response time to http requests

GoSox, old hardware doesn't always save you money. . .

You gotta consider power usage.

this is going in a data center

"free" power

Also, HP Proliants suck.

or at least, flat-rate power

wow, you have a DC that doesn't charge for power?

The Proliant name hasn't meant shit since HP bought out Compaq.

do you have another suggestion? For a 1U, dual PS, LOM-equipped, DD4-era machine that will be nice and affordable?

its a high traffic web server, but its still just a web server, and web serving is not a demanding task by today's server demand standards

Dell PowerEdge, Cisco UCS C-chassis, SuperMicro maybe.

meh, poweredge is not inherently better than proliant

the proliant stuff is fine, tbh all x86 enterprise stuff is basically comparable

Um. . . nonsense.

my current machine is a 2009 Apple Xserve :P

PowerPC?

and if it was local, I'd probably just replace the dirves and install freebsd on that. But thats not practical

no no, intel

2009, PowerPC? unlikely

i did have PPC ones way back in the day

a G4, then a G5, then a series of intels

2009 is the final year they made them, i don't even remember the specs, dual CPU with some large amount of cores

I thought Apple ended the Xservs before they went Intel.

heres how little processing power web serving takes, even with related databases and PHP scripts, I still have BOINC running and using 50% of this machine's CPU cores at all times

nope the intel switch was 2006, there were 3 or 4 intel Xserve models

so out of interest, what's wrong with your Xserve that you want to replace it?

its running macos

ancient macos

:(

i think what that really means is you're not running a high-traffic site...

hah, ok

dangerously old macos

:|

you can't boot FreeBSD on it?

also the hard drives are dying

well its all relative i guess

Spinning rust. . ..

physicall access would be needed to install freeBSD, and Ive never set up a BSD machine before, so I need to figure out how to do it without having the whole server be down

i'm willing to bet you could spin up an aws lightsail instance running freebsd and save a lot of time, money, and hassle and not have any impact on performance

new hardware is definitely the way to go

fink: but then you'd be depenant on the clowd

yeah, i like doing my own thing. i bitched and moaned when SSL became a requirement

letsencrypt has a bad day and all my sites can be down :(

doing your own thing? you mean like relying on someone else for power, cooling, routing, security, etc etc etc

i still complain about TLS, not to mention DNS, ridiculously authoritarian systems

i bet my data center can supply power and connectivity more reliably than letsencrypt can supply root certificate services

root

whoops wrong window

anyway I have a 2012 Mac mini on my desk, a leftover machine. I'm going to install freebsd on it and see how well I can make it work. With all the basics i need, apache, php, mariadb, a mail server, file server, some kind of vpn

if that all goes well then i'll repeat with actual rackmount hardware

i'm really looking forward to immunity from SynFlood attacks

Better not use TCP then.

are there multiple package managers on freebsd? if so, is one the primary/main/most popular one?

For the base system, freebsd-update is used. For everything else there's MasterCard. Oops, I mean ports.

Ports has a handful of management utilities (portmaster for example) but pre-built binaries can be installed via pkg(1).

theres still ppc versions of freebsd, hmm maybe i should install it on an old G4 mac mini :D

GoSox: that would be cool

i think 512 MB of ram is the max on those things though

I wouldn't expect a GUI web browsing type experinece lol

my grandmother still has a 2005 G4 Mac mini on her desk that she hasn't used in probably 10 years at this point.

its so old though that its not even worth messing around with

i have so many much newer minis literally on this desk with me right now

ok freebsd 14.1 is going on this 2012 mini. i hope it goes nice and smooth

is there a good/easy guide for installing/setting up a good GUI on a clean freebsd install?

looking in to it, i guess a better question is, is there a way i can sample every popular gui you can easily run on freeBSD so I can decide which one I like best :P

there appear to be several GUIs that are "mac like". But honestly, i would prefer a GUI that is more like classic Mac. Mac OS 8. circa 1998. I'd prefer that over a GUI that looks like modern macOS, for a system that is not a mac

GoSox: You can install different ones and try them out, just keep in mind that some of them are fairly large

i may have to set up a virtual machine and install them all to take a sampling

so how is it that GhostBSD is on version 24 when freeBSD is only on version 14? What do these numbers actually mean?

It's version 24 of GhostBSD, which in turn is built on FreeBSD 14 stable

so is ghostbsd just always the freebsd version it's based on, plus 10?

No

It just happens to be +10 right now because of how the releases landed in time

info

we use man pages here

sstill working on them tho

[mike@fbsd15 ~]$ man woman

No manual entry for "woman"

:]

GhostBSD seems nice

meh

aptly named tho

there's so many dists of unix/linux

Linux yes, nno bsd distrtos

how to choose :D

there is one FreeBSD, the other few are forks

I mean, why should one use bsd as base for desktop? bsd/unix is said to be more for server purpose

fbsd*

you probably should not unless youre a fbsd nerd

okok

if i wasnt a masochist, id used Fedora for destop

and why would you use fedora instead of debian or ubuntu?

but fbsd, even on desktrop, still retains that nice sense of order and "properness"

is it because of the base system or the environment you do your selection?

i like ithat its very up to date, and uses KDE.... and it just works for me

okok

well, KDE6 now, which thinkgs like candy like HDR support

so it's a hardware support matter mostly when choosing?

seems not as bloaty as Canonical too

and "up to date" is important too ofc-.

dnf works... no flatpaks/fotm pkg repo for me...

I honeslty don't know so muc about the other systems/dists, that's why I'm asking :)

41 just came out

okok

I try to understand how ppl think when choosing.

or if it's like choosing an icecream

kind of... a mix of flavour/functionality

for servers stuff tho, i always lean towards fbsd whenever i can

same here ^^

guess I'd choose it also for desktop.. unless it doean't support something (hardware/other stuff) when desktoping.

seems fbsd is pretty much up to date and in line with the current hardware nowdays?

usuually wifi is a pita

reswt is ok

both amd/nvidia make drivers

I really don't run the latest hardware tho, so I don't know.

and kde works well, some of the WMs have a bit of Linuxism in them tho

But stuff works without hassle with my stuff tho, and it's kind of new.

bsd + xfce4

very lightweight

even kde5 is not bad

ah, I don't know which desktop handler i'd choose.. but what's coming with ghost looks good :)

clean and simple

kde is one of your favourites?

ah

in october 2025 win10 will loose it's possibility to do updates via microsoft. So guess I'll try a unix/linux dist then. Or buy new HW and win 11 :D

for me? yes, i love KDE

very functional, very configurable, looks great, fast....

GNOME looks like a Mac to me

somethinbg id buy my grandma

Old people already have plenty of gnomes in their front yard from my experience.

lol @ TommyC

dandyn: that does it for me paste.pics/SEWKB

also, i trust ZFS just as much as my 3 GSDs

wooo.. its snowing outside....

am i the only one that misses mergemaster -iFU?

anyone on who has control of our Discord server? Having a hard time finding a mod.

Hi. I got this error message during 14.1 p6 install.

Scanning /usr/share/certs/trusted for certificates...

pwd_mkdb: corrupted entry

pwd_mkdb: //etc/master.passwd: Inappropriate file type or format done.

Apparently p6 installation went ok and it is properly working. Just wondering why, about this mkdb messages.

cybercrypto: did you edit that file by hand or something?

or bad merging during update

sponix2ipfw: not really.

sponix2ipfw: uname -a return running p5 patch now. and fetch says = No updates needed to update system to 14.1-RELEASE-p6.

cybercrypto: Yeah, that is normal for the kernel to say p5 and the userland to say p6 - I have that right now also

Think it is because their was only a userland patch needed and the kernel way fine, so they left it at p5

FreeBSD freebsd 14.1-RELEASE-p5 FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p5 GENERIC amd64

sponix2ipfw: many thanks.

cybercrypto: not a problem. I'm NEW to FreeBSD, but been doing Linux forever

if you have 70000 files in a folder, for i in * does not work because *'s expansion is too large. How do you iterate in that case?

find -exec (or exec0)

so it GhostBSD a "different" OS than freeBSD, or is it literally freeBSD with a GUI preinstalled and preconfigured?

find . -exec echo {} +

why the output appears without "\n" ?

GoSox: it does a bit more than just that. but that is the basics

I haven't gotten to vm the latest one, prior release would not run qbittorrent for me for some reason