one year with Archlinux on a server

It is now more than a year gone by since I left behind FreeBSD to run everything on Archlinux.

So how is it going?

the first 6 months

The first 6 months went rather well and I mostly set the system up in a way how I always wanted it. Parts of the stack got split into machined instances, network was fine and I was finally didn’t have to build new packages all the time but instead ran the update command once every week.

ZFSonLinux gave me a bit of trouble a couple of times but that went away after I switched to the linux-lts package for the lts Kernel.

Archlinux also wasn’t the best for running Postgres. But I made do with packaging my own version of Postgres, each major version into its own package series. This way I can update minor versions and don’t loose my database instance with major version updates.

For certificate management I was using acme-tiny. To automate it a bit further I wrote myself a small wrapper called certmgmt.

the later 6 months

The later 6 months were a bit of a sad phase. I got tired of always taking care of 20 machined instances. There were also some changes in a couple services I’ve run that required more care than I wanted to invest.

One of these things was taking care of certificates. Sometimes the certificate management broke out of the blue and caused some unnecessary downtime.

So I moved some websites that were php based before into static websites and replaced nginx with caddy to take care of certificate management. Not all went well, but at the moment, everything works better than before.

So now I am down to only 5 machined instances. It is by far much less work overall and much less breakage. It could probably work better if I automated the update and installation process a bit. I have some ideas on how to do that, but I am missing the time.

Is it better?

But is it better overall? In comparison to the FreeBSD setup I had before, it feels better and more stable. Until now I only had one kernel issue with ZFS, which was resolved by switching to the LTS kernel. But being able to utilize systemd with all its features definitely helped a lot.

Would I ever go back to FreeBSD?

If I would be able to run systemd (or a similar tool with very good tooling) on FreeBSD, I think I would switch back instantly. I miss pf and some of the really good tools of FreeBSD, but the quality of Archlinux and systemd is definitely there.

And who knows, maybe the next cow Filesystem bcachefs makes ZFS obsolete on Linux. It would be sad, because running multiple OS’ from one zpool is working great, but sadly that isn’t needed as often.

But it would be nice if FreeBSD could make some kind of come back, just to keep the competition alive.