75 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
75 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
+++
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title = "one year with Archlinux on a server"
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date = "2023-09-18T19:00:00+00:00"
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author = "Gibheer"
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It is now more than a year gone by since I left behind FreeBSD to run everything
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on Archlinux.
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So how is it going?
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the first 6 months
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-----------------
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The first 6 months went rather well and I mostly set the system up in a way
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how I always wanted it.
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Parts of the stack got split into machined instances, network was fine and I was
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finally didn't have to build new packages all the time but instead ran
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the update command once every week.
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ZFSonLinux gave me a bit of trouble a couple of times but that went away after
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I switched to the linux-lts package for the lts Kernel.
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Archlinux also wasn't the best for running Postgres. But I made do with packaging
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my own version of Postgres, each major version into its own package series.
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This way I can update minor versions and don't loose my database instance with
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major version updates.
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For certificate management I was using acme-tiny. To automate it a bit further
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I wrote myself a small wrapper called [certmgmt](https://git.zero-knowledge.org/gibheer/certmgmt).
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the later 6 months
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------------------
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The later 6 months were a bit of a sad phase. I got tired of always taking care
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of 20 machined instances.
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There were also some changes in a couple services I've run that required more
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care than I wanted to invest.
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One of these things was taking care of certificates. Sometimes the certificate
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management broke out of the blue and caused some unnecessary downtime.
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So I moved some websites that were php based before into static websites and
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replaced nginx with caddy to take care of certificate management.
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Not all went well, but at the moment, everything works better than before.
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So now I am down to only 5 machined instances. It is by far much less work
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overall and much less breakage.
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It could probably work better if I automated the update and installation
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process a bit. I have some ideas on how to do that, but I am missing the time.
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Is it better?
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-------------
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But is it better overall? In comparison to the FreeBSD setup I had before, it
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feels better and more stable.
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Until now I only had one kernel issue with ZFS, which was resolved by switching
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to the LTS kernel.
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But being able to utilize systemd with all its features definitely helped a lot.
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Would I ever go back to FreeBSD?
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If I would be able to run systemd (or a similar tool with very good tooling)
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on FreeBSD, I think I would switch back instantly.
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I miss pf and some of the really good tools of FreeBSD, but the quality of
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Archlinux and systemd is definitely there.
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And who knows, maybe the next cow Filesystem [bcachefs](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/next/linux-next.git/commit/?id=94dd1c72d0e882ffd01f929daf06c38924d8447b) makes ZFS obsolete on
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Linux.
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It would be sad, because running [multiple OS' from one zpool](129.md) is working great,
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but sadly that isn't needed as often.
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But it would be nice if FreeBSD could make some kind of come back, just to keep
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the competition alive.
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