💾 Archived View for tozip.chickenkiller.com › 2022-06-12-new-server.gmi captured on 2022-07-16 at 13:55:27. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Created 2022-06-12
A new, more secure, server has been set up to host my gemini account.
It moves from
gemini://blinkyshark.chickenkiller.com
to
gemini://tozip.chickenkiller.com
I have switched the server from Agate running on an amd64 Debian Stable server to Molly Brown running on a Pi 3 FreeBSD.
Using FreeBSD on a Pi 1 turned out to be not such a great idea. It has "Tier 2" support, making it a bit bleah. A lot of ports are not included. I installed guile, but that caused a segfault. Abort mission.
Support for the Pi 3 seems a lot better, as it is a "Tier 1" platform.
So, I guess the question is "why FreeBSD"? The onboard Wifi does not work. I use a separate dongle. Raspberry Pi OS works with the onboard Wifi out of the box, as you might expect. I'm not sure to what extent it works on other Linux distros. Wifi seems a bit of a binary blob thing which the Pi Foundation is privy to, but no-one else. Notwithstanding that, I chose FreeBSD anyway.
Everything seems to be working just fine on the Pi 3. It is quite a fast computer, provided you do not try to use modern web browsers. I do not have X installed. Maybe I'll check it out one day, but as my intention is to run the server headless, I'm in no rush to install it.
I must say, the number of packages that are available on FreeBSD surprised me. There seem to be more on FreeBSD than on Debian. Now that's a surprise! I wonder how many Linux distros have such a wide range of packages. Probably Arch with AUR. There's support for Zig in FreeBSD, which is quite nice. And also atlast, which is a Forth. I never expected to find that. There also seems to be incoming support for the new Hare programming language. That seems to be a very very new addition, and one that I'm interested in finding out about. It's not appearing to me as a port. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's amd64 just for now, or maybe I have a slightly stale ports tree. I'm keen to have a play with it.
Another aspect that I like about FreeBSD is its init system. The rc.conf seems pretty straightforward to me. I have never really liked systemd, although I don't interact with it much as I tend to write my own apps rather than fiddle around with system administration. Having played around with FreeBSD a little bit, I cann now say that I like systemd even less.
So, that's about it for now.
Transmission ends