Awesome BSD

My experience with Linux is big, while with FreeBSD have few months. I am starting to Love BSD systems, while the Free is more fast than the Open, in terms of Memory usage, the Open is more stable than the Free

Using BSD, being Open or Free is the most closer UNIX experience that someone can have, while normally we like to install a Desktop, is always good to look into the basis to be familiarized with the default applications. Because in my experience the Net BSD system always fail to install, I have no clue about it, but I like the Ghost version of it. For a Desktop GhostBSD is stable and use almost the same features that anyone can find on other BSD systems.

Using FreeBSD to manage a Server is in fact the main gold and the best solution I ever used. By using FreeBSD virtualization of many machines is possible, without using too much hardware resources, as it would be needed if this objective was for some company. But in this case, is just me an my computer, that is not the best but is not the worst. I can manage between 3 and 4 Virtual Machines, using Jails or even emulating Linux using the VM or using other known alternatives like QEMU , KVM and XEN. I know nothing about XEN and have little experience with QEMU and KVM.

Between Thin Jails and Thick Jails, I like the last ones since they improve Security of Jails, without depending on the Main Host. Preparing Jails by hand is a little bit complex, because blog posts don't always tell you some details that are needed to setup the configurations correctly. Like for example, the vtnet driver that need to have a dedicated Jail making bridge to different jails/hosts, need to be added to the loader.conf file before trying to use it. FreeBSD handbook don't describe advanced features like the vtnet driver and the name of network cards, etc. Therefor, using tools like pot, cBSD, Bastille and others, can simplify Jails administration, including the Bhyve.

Personally, the more I understand about FreeBSD, the more I like the UNIX experience, meaning that I don't need to install any Graphical interface, to spend more hardware resources. I keep it as simple as is possible, to make it fast and minimal. Using Tmux is the best way to manage many terminal in the same place. Each Tab can have it's own name to differenciate them. Since FreeBSD use sh as the default shell, you may wish to create your own Vim scripts or install Bash to use external scripts that normally ask Bash used on almost Linux Distros.

Listing the basic commands and manuals:
man rc, man rc.conf, man syslogd, man tunefs, man restore, man pf.conf, man jail, man jail.conf, man vm, man rctl, man sysctl, man top, man vmstat, man ifconfig, man route, man sockstat, man netstat, man dump, man tcpdump

Naturally there are many more, but with this ones you can start creating your Server. Some reading is necessary, because changes can happen and normally blog posts can be old and therefor useless and error-prone. For example, Peter Hansteen wrote a manual about pf, where you can check several options that you can find on the web, while some of them are old, different BSD systems can change their default syntax and options. The author of srobb.net wrote another version about this awesome Firewall solution, to manage redirection and block unwanted traffic, from inbound to outbound NAT connections in a easier way.

The biggest problem of FreeBSD is Memory Usage, when using zfs. ZFS is damn useful and easy to maintain, but it cost some extra memory usage. Another issue is that Memory is not released after being used and in case we don't reboot the machine, for some cases, can overload the system and break/crash. Only in that aspect, comparing to all distros that I already test, Gentoo [WAS] the best Linux Distro years ago to manage Memory. Right now I don't know because they change a lot and I must admit, I always fail to install Gentoo. And Lets face it, having to deal with all package problems that are very common on Gentoo, is spending time in something that (all other distros do, since they care to present to their users, a working default installation, that WORKS!!!). Yes. From OpenSuse to Debian, Arch, Slackware, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Fedora, CentOS and even Pentoo create a installation system that works. Based on the Documentation, Arch Linux Wiki and FreeBSD Handbook are the best docs for each, while I cannot ignore OpenBSD simplicity and documentation, even if website UI is pure HTML with some clear CSS. Not like this site use. with a lot of colors to mark the different words sticked.

Just to give a better reading experience to the visitors.

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