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A comment on Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux? by nieve on Saturday November 22, 2014 @11:10AM (#8645830)
I may be confused since I'm only now moving some servers to FreeBSD, but it sounds like you're suggesting freebsd-update brings in bleeding age, incompatible version if you want to get security fixes. Is that actually the case? I've got zero interest in running it as a desktop so I'm guessing that'll hit me less, but it's worrisome to hear.

As a side note, I'd love to have something like "freebsd-update rollback" for most Linux distros. I've seen attempts at it, but the only one that worked well for me was openSUSE integration of btrfs snapshots and the package manager. That's kind of swatting a fly with the complete works of Knuth, but it did the job.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/updating-upgrading-freeb...

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Re:Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux? by X-Istence on Saturday November 22, 2014 @09:46PM (#8647629)
For having the easy rollbacks, take a look at FreeBSD with ZFS on root with boot environments:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/howto-freebsd-zfs-madness...

https://github.com/vermaden/beadm/

http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Multiple_Boot_Environments

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Re:Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux? by vertex-four on Saturday November 22, 2014 @11:18AM (#8645848)
Not freebsd-update - Ports, the third-party package tree. There's no attempt made to create a "release branch" of Ports that gets kept up-to-date with security patches.
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Re:Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux? by byuu on Saturday November 22, 2014 @11:52AM (#8645946)
Correct, I should have clarified that. Since you mentioned server usage, keep in mind that the server software (Apache, PGSQL, PHP, OpenSSL, etc) are ports. Not that they're as unstable as desktop software usually is.

I have my VPS (production) and a local HDD I use for testing (stage), configured exactly the same way. I'll update stage first, and if all looks good, then I'll update production.

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Re:Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux? by nieve on Sunday November 23, 2014 @02:26AM (#8648080)
Thanks, I appreciate the clarification from you and vertex-four. I was indeed missing the ports part of what you were saying. I'm relatively comfortable with that since I'm not going to be using FreeBSD for any large-scale deployments and the software I care about tends to be reasonably good at backwards compatibility. In the case of PostgreSQL I'd test, but in an emergency I feel like I could do a live upgrade without too much stress. I'll have to keep an eye on Nginx and Sphinx, though.
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