FiLiS runs FreeBSD

I’m a sysadmin-by-accident since about 1998. I co-founded netzkommune.de in 2000 and now we mostly specialize in managed hosting and consulting.

I kinda stumbled into the whole Internet business pretty much after high school, while working part time at a dotcom-startup in 1998. Being the only person who “knew” Linux (I had installed some Linux distro from floppy in ~1995 on my 486), I was tasked with all things non-Windows, running stock qmail back when it was pretty new.

When starting netzkommune, we ran some Slackware and/or Red Hat (I don’t quite recall), hosted on an AMD K6 at Rackspace. When talking to a friend about qmail and how complicated patching and installing it, he showed me the FreeBSD ports system and how installing qmail there was just cd /usr/ports/mail/qmail && make install. The next box I set up was FreeBSD 4.3 and I never looked back. Today, all of our servers run FreeBSD, its main benefits for us are ZFS, jails and poudriere. Being able to prepackage and test things with our own/multiple configs, takes the edge off of most of packaging tasks, knowing there are replicated snapshots of pretty much everything as an addition to offsite backups for quick recovery of a fatfingered file modification, is invaluable to us.

Not being a developer, I still feel I can grasp most of the OS’s processes and architecture, that simplicity a huge plus that most people seem to have forgotten about.

Find me on Twitter and Mastodon.

12 Aug 2018

Maintained by Mischa Peters and Roman Zolotarev
Hosted by OpenBSD Amsterdam
Sponsored by netzkommune