FreeBSD, Courtesy of Novell, Richard Bejtlich, and my friend Todd
It’s happened. I looked around yesterday and realized I’ve switched from Linux to FreeBSD. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to switch. It just seems that as projects came up I would find some compelling reason to choose FreeBSD over Linux. Now that I look around, I see the pattern. It wasn’t purposeful, but I’m happy with where it’s going.
You need to understand that I started using Linux about eight years ago and got serious with it over the last five years or so. Actually I have my friend Todd to thank for turning me on to Linux as part of his infatuation with integration. It started off innocently enough with some Linux firewalls (the LRP project to be exact) that I could make work, but it was still mostly black magic. Over time I got to using Sendmail, iptables/Shorewall, Samba, LAMP, and all manner of Linux goodness.
By this time I was settled in with SuSE as a distro of choice. SuSE was running in my office, most of my cilents in some fashion, and in my data center rack. Life was good. Then Novell entered the picture. They bought SuSE up, and as usual sucked the life out of something good. Dang. Actually it took a couple of releases before the fears were confirmed and I left SuSE. Over time I played around with a list of distros that I liked for some reasons and hated for others. Nothing ever seemed to fit well for the many scenarios I had used SuSE for.
Over the last couple years I’ve been reading Richard Bejtlich’s TaoSecurity blog, and his general endorsement of FreeBSD interested me. Then, my friend Todd pointed out pfSense, a BSD based firewall distribution running pf. After running shorewall on Linux hosts, pfSense was somewhat constrictive though. The logical extension was running pf directly on FreeBSD, and now my firewalls and many of my customers’ firewalls are on FreeBSD.
So now I am running FreeBSD on as many hosts as Linux, and I expect to convert most of what remains to FreeBSD as boxes age out. As a matter of fact, one of my next project will be to replace my office Samba server with new hardware running FreeBSD and Samba.
So far I like what I’ve learned, and I can foresee using FreeBSD as an OS of choice for quite some time.