From Solaris to FreeBSD

Less than one week after I switched my hosting over to Solaris 10, with all its ZFS/dtrace goodness, Oracle quietly makes a license change that everybody dealing with Solaris is likely now familiar with, and Solaris 10 is no longer free to use. Emails to Sun/Oracle’s licensing department result only in form letters repeating instructions on the website, and then nothing.

I can’t really blame Oracle for this, Sun didn’t make enough money to survive, and Oracle has this radical idea that you need to actually charge people in order to make money. I can blame them for not providing more clarity regarding the issue (so far they haven’t announced anything), and for leaving customers unsure about what’s going to happen next. However, this is mostly besides the point. I now needed to look into a good alternative.

OpenSolaris is the obvious candidate, and I’ve played around with it a little previously, but I can’t make myself like some of the changes made to it. The biggest annoyances being related to the new packaging system and some of the poor choices made in its design (e.g. no –nodeps option). That is an entire post (or rather, rant) in itself however. In addition to this, I can’t help but believe that Oracle is going to make some change to OpenSolaris that makes it not a realistic option.

This is where FreeBSD comes in. With release 8.0, ZFS has become a fully supported filesystem. It has dtrace support, jails (just like zones), even virtual networking so you can have a full network stack inside the jail.

For my personal server, the main feature I was interested in was ZFS, specifically ZFS root/boot. With ZFS it is trivial to set up mirrored drives, and I wanted to avoid doing software raid with UFS as well as ZFS. Thankfully there is extensive documentation on how to do this. It isn’t in the standard install, but if you need a repeatable procedure for many servers, it’s a (relatively) simple matter to script the installation, and you would probably want to do this anyway for an automated install.

There were a few gotchas, as with any new system you’re not familiar with, but so far it looks quite nice. I’ll be looking further into jails (especially the vimage jails) and other nice features. Hopefully, FreeBSD will turn out to be a good replacement for Solaris.