My Inner Nerd is a Little Sad

I’ve been running FreeBSD on my servers for years. My production server has gone from FreeBSD 5 to 8, all without me ever having to visit it. It has been an excellent operating system for me.

In the past several months I’ve been going through a lot of consolidation. Five physical servers in my house have become one physical server with Xen virtual machines. Obviously this included a move to Linux (Centos 5.4 to be precise).

As I’ve become more comfortable managing the Centos server it became apparent that I spend the same amount of time managing that and its five virtual machines as I spend managing the one remaining FreeBSD machine.  Now, some of that can be blamed on some decisions I made with FreeBSD, staying away from the binary updates and packages and instead using source and ports.

So, with a slight twinge of regret, I’ve been preparing to rebuild that server sometime late this week or early next and putting Linux on it.  The move will mean I’ll be fresh out of FreeBSD, the mainstay for me for so many years.

It’s funny the things you’ll become sentimental for.