I’m a software developer from Melbourne, Australia. I got my introduction to UNIX when I started university in 1999. I was amazed that the Sun systems there supported hundreds of simultaneous users with uptimes of months at a time.
This prompted me to look into running UNIX at home. A friend had tried FreeBSD so I thought I’d give NetBSD a go just to try something different. I installed it on an old PC I had cobbled together from donated parts. I was thrilled to be running, learning about, and administering my very own UNIX system at home! A little while later, I set up a FreeBSD machine to connect to our dial-up internet service and share the connection on our home network.
For desktop computing I was a long time Mac OS X user up until January 2017 when I switched my daily computing environment to a combination of FreeBSD and Linux. I wrote about that experience on my website, Bit Cannon.
FreeBSD is my preferred BSD these days but I also like to dabble in other BSDs from time to time. I have at times run a NetBSD VPS and also currently run an OpenBSD VPS. My main machines right now are:
The features of FreeBSD that appeal to me are ZFS, the stable base + rolling packages model, great performance, wide software support, binary packages with security updates for stable releases, and the permissive licence. ZFS is a huge deal for me. I like to know that important data like photos is stored redundantly and with error correction that will help prevent that data being damaged over time.
You can find me writing about my operating system adventures on Bit Cannon, programming and other technology on my blog, as well as on Twitter and Mastodon.
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