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Old 8th October 2008
Bruco Bruco is offline
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Default What do YOU use FreeBSD for?

I've been tinkering with FreeBSD for about a year or so now, ever since I realized I wanted and needed more UNIX knowledge (partly for my job) and decided on FreeBSD, largely because it's free and has great documentation.

Now I'm reaching a point where I'm considering ways to implement it into my work environment - potentially as a file server, for instance - and it made me wonder what other folks on the forum here use FreeBSD for. I still have a lot to learn and just hearing about different applications of FreeBSD might spark my learning process.

At home I have a PC with FreeBSD 6.3 on it that I use for:
File server
Apache
Squid proxy
BitTorrent client
Network troubleshooting (w/Wireshark)

At work I have an old PIII running 6.3 that does some monitoring I couldn't do properly with our Windows monitoring box. It also runs some scripts that will login and enter commands into some Cisco devices if a WAN link goes down (in cases where redundant routes didn't do what I wanted on the Cisco device).

So, what do you use FreeBSD for, both at home and at work?
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Old 8th October 2008
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SSH Server (file server)
Music Server (mpd + sshfs)
Standard Desktop
- OpenOffice
- Gimmix
- Sonata
- Firefox
- Mplayer
- Xfce4
- Tons more...
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Old 8th October 2008
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Too many to mention, for everything except virtualization generally (if you do not count QEMU and Jails).

For virtualziation I choose OpenSolaris and/or NetBSD (Xen).
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Old 8th October 2008
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For virtualization, I choose SXCE or NetBSD. Of course, the guy who's working on Xen DomU support for FreeBSD 8 said that Dom0 could actually make it in.
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Old 9th October 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ninjatux View Post
For virtualization, I choose SXCE or NetBSD. Of course, the guy who's working on Xen DomU support for FreeBSD 8 said that Dom0 could actually make it in.
Propably in FreeBSD 9, but better late then never
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Old 8th October 2008
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I use FreeBSD at home, mainly as desktop system.
also i run qemu, and virtualize some things (for learning purposes)
and learning C++, sh
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Old 8th October 2008
hamba hamba is offline
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I use FreeBSD at work as a file, web and database server, a firewall/router and then I've got a system with loads of jails for all sorts of stuff.
At home I'm planning on setting up a similar setup as what I've got at work and then for my personal stuff its running my email and web server.

I got a nice new R61i Lenovo laptop that came with Vista and I'm getting very close to the point of installing FreeBSD on it because vista is performing really crap.
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Old 8th October 2008
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Home:
* Samba server running ZFS taking snapshots every night, serving files to everything else in the house, with KDE4 installed for testing/playing

Work:
* firewalls using ipfw/dummynet and openvpn
* backup server using ZFS across 24 drives, using rsync to remotely backup 60+ servers every night, taking snapshots every night (saved our bacon 4 times already since Sept first), using dual-linked gigabit NICs (fman="4"]lagg[/fman])
* (soon) second backup server, offsite, using ZFS snapshot send/receive to replicate the primary backup server
* (soon) NFS server using ZFS acting as the storage node for an off-site server room that will be running virtual machines for backups of all systems at the board office (main district server room) for disaster recovery, backup, fail-over, etc
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Old 9th October 2008
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I use FreeBSD for:

Workstation, Development, and Education needs (programming, scripting, document writing, web development, diagrams and occasional graphics). I say workstation, because I do all of my "work" on the FreeBSD machine, even though it's a very modest laptop! It's also the machine I play "time wasters" on, e.g. xgalaga, kpat, battle for wesnoth, etc. Chatting with friends via AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, TeamSpeak XMPP, and Yahoo! while I write code or surf the WWW / read e-mail, etc. almost the entire time.


I also used FreeBSD ~6.1 as a file and print server for SMB and CUPS at one time. But the machine now runs OpenBSD, providing NFS/SSHFS, Database, Webserver, Backup/Recovery, and CVS-repository resources to my LAN.


All I need now is equipment enough to replace my router >_>
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Old 9th October 2008
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My router was a Pentium2 400 up until less than a year ago, when I upgraded it to a P3 900 so that I could stuff more RAM into it to enhance my squid experience. With just ipfw, hostapd, openvpn, nat, sshd, squid, bind, dhcpd, and dhclient running, it was perfectly fine on the P2, even, and squid was even fine, I just wanted to let it use some more memory for caching.

It routes between three wired cards (internet connection and two switches with different subnets and different ipfw rulesets) and a wireless card which runs as an AP with hostapd. Did all that just fine with only 128 megs of ram, too, by the way.
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Old 9th October 2008
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Virtually everything, except printing. I havent found any FreeBSD application that can handle manual duplex printing.
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Old 9th October 2008
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At home, I have a FreeBSD 7.0 laptop.

At work, I'm running a single FreeBSD 6.3 server with three jails:
  • Application server (perl and some other processing utilities for devs)
  • Squid http proxy
  • Dokuwiki

I'm also pushing for a FreeBSD Amanda server.
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Old 9th October 2008
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I use FreeBSD for all of my computing needs:
LINPACK
ssh
Postfix
socat <~~ You can have a blast with this program. About a hundred and
one ways to get you in bad freaking trouble if not used correctly.
LAPACK
Mplayer
Xmms
Firefox
Mutt
Slrn
Gnash
Etc, etc..

FreeBSD makes a great desktop in my opinion. Over 19,000 programs to
chose from.
I only have two complaints about FreeBSD and they aren't the fault of
FreeBSD (Lack of a Flash player, gnash works but it isn't perfect)
Wow, I had another complaint, but I forgot what it was.
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Old 10th October 2008
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Workstation
Backup server running Bacula
Firewall with pf, jailed squid and DNS server.
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Old 13th October 2008
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Workstation
KDE
EMACS (+Wanderlust mail client)
development (ARM cross compiler)

Servers
File/print server
Web server
Database server (MySQL)
Mail server, each domain in its own jail
Backup server (daily, weekly and monthly snapshots using rsync --link-dest)
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Old 14th October 2008
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Desktop system:
FreeBSD 7.0 + Xfce4
mplayer, xmms, gimp and others..
development - C/C++, PHP, HTML

Servers:
FreeBSD 6.1 gateway + PF/ALTQ
FreeBSD 6.2 file server - Samba, FTP, Apache, MySQL, Qmail, etc..
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Old 16th October 2008
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My 266 MHZ Celeron runs FreeBSD and I'm extremelly happy with it.

I use it for:
  • ssh
  • file sharing (samba)
  • p2p needs (mldonkey w/ web interface)
  • ftp

Last edited by tangram; 16th October 2008 at 01:22 PM. Reason: Fixed spelling errors...
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Old 16th October 2008
Mr-Biscuit Mr-Biscuit is offline
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At home:
basic use,
a few poor attempts at porting.
That and the normal build and learn process.

At work:
I'm a laborer
The system used there is Windows NT with remote access and management that knows far less about it than I do about FreeBSD. Scary thought.

Specs: 1.76G RAM
Sempron 3400+ running in 64bit mode.
AMD anywhere dc0 NIC active card
SB emu10k
96G hd, 59G dedicated to FreeBSD
FreeBSD amd64 RC 7.0
embedded ati graphics card.

Last edited by Mr-Biscuit; 16th October 2008 at 02:53 PM.
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Old 17th October 2008
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Private hobbyist headless server AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2400+ (after older one burned down):
- VPN using tinc;
- Webserver;
- FTP server;
- Counter-Strike server;
Now I install some sort of Linux to all my friends/relatives who complain that their WinXP has become unusable (and it usually is - these folks manage to get 50% of their monitors covered with toolbars in IE, for example, not to mention other crap), without administrative priviledges, and fix all their problems via VPN.
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Old 17th October 2008
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My FreeBSD 7.0 box is used as a work station. Surfing the web, listening to music, image editing (GIMP), e-mail (TBird), xchat, web page designing, document creation.
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