Vivek Gite runs FreeBSD

I am Vivek Gite (aka nixCraft). I am a professional sysadmin and working in IT industry since 1994. I learn the basics of networking, sysadmin, and Unix in school but due to some personal reasons, I dropped out of school.

I first learned about Solaris Unix. I have fallen in love with Unix and related tech ever since. I quickly took a job as a Linux and Unix sysadmin. Around 2000 I was introduced to FreeBSD (FreeBSD version 4 was extremely popular with ISP during 2000 for mass shared hosting and email hosting/routing.) and later to OpenBSD for firewall purpose.

I also created popular Linux, *BSD and Unix sysadmin blog and Linux/Unix and shell scripting forum. I also maintian Linux bash shell scripting wiki. I have written tons of tutorial on both FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

What is your favorite BSD system?

FreeBSD. It has a rock-solid foundation along with impressive tech such as:

• It is Unix. It is Free. It is robust. It pays my bills and put food on table too. ;)
• FreeBSD is the complete operating system. Everything comes from one source.
• Out of box software collection in both base and ports system.
• Documentation — The FreeBSD Handbook.
• Awesome support via FreeBSD forum.
• Jails (much more secure as compared to Linux containers).
• ZFS (never lost a single file on ZFS based NAS or backup system).
• Bhyve.
• Powerful networking stack.
• Friendly developer and BSD sysadmin community. Often I interact with devs online and everyone friendly and treat each other with respect.
• Easy to manage configuration due to KISS and Unix philosophy.
• FreeBSD based products such as pfSense (enterpise grade BSD licensed firewall) and FreeNAS (enterpise grade software dNAS) saves me lots of time while working with my clients. Software built on top of FreeBSD are stable and provide GUI based option to configure firewall and NAS server respectively.
• Stability and updates — The whole FreeBSD box can be simply updated and patched by running freebsd-update and pkg commands.
• Privacy and security. Your private data is not sent or phoned back home when you use FreeBSD.
• Good amount of DevOps and developer tools. I mostly use Perl and the Python-based tool to manage a bunch of servers.

I used OpenBSD on my older MacBook (Late 2006) for a long time before it died out. OpenBSD has a reputation for being extraordinarily secure and robust code auditing for the base system. These days my OpenBSD usage is mostly limited to firewall and router though.

How do you use BSD today?

FreeBSD internet server (www/proxy/pgsql/mysql/nginx/apache).

FreeBSD as Intranet (LAN) server such as DHCP, NFS.

Jails + Rsnapshot to keep backups of nixCraft projects.

pfSense firewall to protect corporate infrastructure.

FreeNAS server as NAS for home and backup system for nixCraft and my clients project.

Ansible is an IT orchestration engine. It automates configuration management, application deployment and many other IT needs for Linux (mostly Centos/RHEL/SUE and Debian/Ubuntu), BSD boxes.

How to use BSD at work?

I have been using FreeBSD for about 18 years and some of my client for about 17 years. Based on my experience and my clients need I suggest FreeBSD when you need: stable network stack, pure Unix experience, microservices/API using nginx, BSD license, a well-defined path for operating system updates, timely security patches.

FreeBSD means job security for you too. Pay is good as compared to Windows or other IT pros. BSD is often needed some sysadmin knowledge, ability to read documents, a bit of coding in sh, Perl, python, C, etc.

You can run FreeBSD on everything. Most of my clients use it on AWS EC2 and GCP. We use it for a variety of purposes in a single user mode or in a clustered mode where a bunch of FreeBSD servers scales out web applications or support mobile applications:

• Nginx server or Apache server
• Static and dynamic asset caching
• TLS/SSL acceleration and termination
• Database server
• VPN (IPSec or OpenVPN)
• Firewall
• NAS, CIFS, NFS server, etc

I use Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS on the desktop as many of my clients use KVM on Ubuntu/CentOS and Linux containers. Ubuntu also supports remote server management tools such as Intel AMT/ME, impitool, and other legacy IT stuff that need Java, Flash and old stuff that only supported over a serial console. It is better than using Windows 10. ;)

I also have a company issued MacBook Pro (Mid 2014), that I used when compliance in enteprise IT needed where only supported options are Windows 7/10 or macOS.

6 Aug 2018

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