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  • I know the feeling, having recently migrated a solid TrueNAS 13.3 to a hand-built FreeBSD 13.5. The main reason was to get OpenZFS 2.3 RAIDZ expansion as storage was getting tight. It turns out to be quite similar using Webmin for GUI and BastilleBSD for jails.

    There were a few hiccups, such as learning about bootloader versions, but after a few Saturdays tinkering it has been running solid and I’m very pleased.

    by itchingsphynx
  • Have you looked at zVault at all?

    https://zvault.io/

    by lproven
  • That's similar to me, I started using FreeNAS back in the 9.x days.

    At the time the FreeNAS documentation recommend installing to a usb drive. This proved unreliable, but dedicating a drive to it was silly given it couldn't be used for anything else. I had all the things I needed but I wanted to peel back the layers and this seemed like a good excuse

    So I threw in a drive and installed freebsd 10 and spent a few days familiarising myself with everything, learned how to configure samba myself, learned how to setup jails with iocage (the old shell version), and finally imported my pool.

    Years later very little has changed.

    by AndrewDavis
  • Just two weeks ago, I spun up a FreeBSD server on OVH and migrated a service to it from Railway. Playing with jails, pf, ZFS, and some other goodies has been a lot of fun. Since I (massively) over-provisioned, I also spun up Gitea, Woodpecker CI (and agent; blazing fast CICD is so nice), and a personal blog. Been a great learning project.

    [] It's not my first time with FreeBSD. I first ran it in ~2004. But it's been over 10 years since I last ran it, and I'd forgotten a decent bit. The last time I ran it, I just set up a couple of jails for NAS and Plex and proceeded to not touch it until I moved.

    by tiltowait
  • How's the UX for jails these days? I remember trying to use it barebones and also some of the wrappers.
    by dorian-graph
  • I'm using FreeBSD for self-hosting, home NAS and router from version 2.2.0. As it is my hobby projects, I don't want to migrate to Linux which is, IMHO, over-represented.

    But it become harder and harder in recent years.

    Reason? Docker.

    Many current «server-side» products doesn't have good instructions how to install them «by hands» and is not very suitable for system-side packaging (creating port), as they have build systems designed to be used in CI with online access in build time (especially node.js-based and go-based ones, but rust goes same way).

    Installation instructions, well-defined dependencies, good versioning, immutable source distribution files? Nah. «Take this Docker file and run it».

    It is pity.

    by blacklion
  • You can pretty much study the Dockerfile of each docker image and you'll see how it's installed. It's all there, no magic
    by fractalf
  • This may help you.

    « An introduction to OCI Containers on FreeBSD

    October 31, 2025 »

    https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/oci-containers-on-freebsd...

    by lproven
  • I feel like these "self-host and free yourself" articles would be better served giving us an estimate on the amount of time they spent on the process. That might help sell people more if I know it will take me 3 hours to setup a Bastille VPS w/jails for Caddy website, syncthing, Cal/Card/WebDAV, etc.

    Then I can put 1.5 hours of effort into it one day setting up and getting used to Bastille and another 1.5 hours another day installing my software. Maybe my request is silly but most people say "I don't have the time or patience to self host" but what does "dont have the time" mean? Sure it's variable from person to person. It might increase interest in self hosting if people have a better idea of what they would be getting into.

    This would pair well with encouraging a system like Bastille that just wants to get out of your way (two contextual views of time-savings).

    by righthand
  • I still run a server for hosting my Jellyfin and n8n, but I've honestly been moving a lot of my stuff to cloud hosting stuff. I found that trying to maintain uptime for all my services started to become a pretty huge time sink and I realized that I really didn't gain anything by hosting my blog on my own server with Nginx instead of just using a free Cloudflare Pages with Quartz.

    I think it's ultimately a sign of aging; I don't really have the attention span or energy to LARP as a sysadmin anymore, especially since I never really enjoyed that aspect of computers anyway. I think my monthly cost of storage would get untenable if I tried to move all my raw media rips to the cloud (about 45TB [1]), so I don't think I'll be able to migrate my Jellyfin for the foreseeable future, but I would like to some day.

    [1] Looking it up, storing 45TB would end up costing anywhere between $250-$1500 a month pretty easily, which I currently cannot justify.

    by tombert
  • > [1] Looking it up, storing 45TB would end up costing anywhere between $250-$1500 a month pretty easily, which I currently cannot justify.

    Or about $5k one-off at pCloud, which is still a big investment. (No affiliation, just a customer.)

    by degamad
  • I installed Jellyfin on my home server a few months ago but it’s already broken by upgrading to 10.11, and unusable until I restore 10.10 from backup or start over: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/15027. There seem to be lots of other database migration bugs for this release and other ones.
    by mk12
  • I'm curious which aspect(s) became a time sink for you? I self-host a bunch of stuff myself. I can't say I never spend time on it, but it's measured in hours per year. Once stuff is set up, it just runs.
    by MattJ100
  • I recently set up an OpenBSD based router in our home and, man, it felt like a breath of fresh air.

    I wrote about it here: https://www.blog.montgomerie.net/posts/2025-10-11-setting-up...

    by jrmg
  • Thank you for sharing the write up!

    Not an OpenBSD expert by any means, but two small pieces of minor feedback as everything else you wrote mirrors my own setup and experience. Firstly, unless you are really strapped for space on say a 90s machine, it is generally recommended to install all the file sets as there can be interactions with ports even if one does not expect it (say ffmpeg needing X11 libraries). The general OpenBSD mindset is after all "Use the defaults" and the default is to install all the file sets. Secondly, the OpenBSD Handbook has a bit of a mixed reputation in the community from what I can tell. Unlike the FreeBSD Handbook, it is not an official document and I tend to rely on man pages, openbsd.org, misc@, and a few blogs I consider to be trustworthy instead.

    As a final note, glad to see you have IPv6 up and running. I really should get around to it now that dhcp6leased has been in base for more than two releases.

    by ninjin
  • This really resonates. Sometimes the best reason to switch tech is just to feel that spark of learning again. I build self-hosting platforms and have spent years trying to make it “easy”, even getting it to work on Windows/macOS. But honestly, the magic isn’t in convenience. It’s in that figuring it out phase imho...
    by SurceBeats
  • When we don't have convenience and rather jump into the sea directly, we would actually learn how the stack works and not how the convenience wrapper worked. We would feel more confident in our ability to do more things without requiring somebody else's help and more. It is this reason why figuring out this phase feels really important and lovely even, yet most people feel its hardness and leave it aside since they just want something which just works

    Fortunately, for them, I think with technologies like docker/podman, flatpak, appimage etc. I feel like its already easy-ish enough.

    Side nit pick but I hate when apps create docker/podman containers when they can also have flatpak, I would love to see some self hosting apps which have a gui or maybe even some cli hosted via flatpak but I rarely saw cli apps in flatpak etc.

    by awesomecomment
  • Nice website design. I don't like to use the same stuff I use for work at home because home is supposed to be fun.

    So I used to have everything FreeBSD but I've stopped using around 2020 when I've started buying computers that have different core configurations like ARM RockChip and Intel Alder Lake. I believe the term is called big.LITTLE when you have efficient and performance cores.

    As of now the FreeBSD scheduler is not making full use of big.LITTLE. TBF It works and your mileage might vary and you might also pin stuff to cores but not ideal.

    Meanwhile I went back to Linux and fell into the Nix rabbit hole.

    I might go back once they get ULE to be able to use my Alder Lake efficiently.

    by irusensei
  • I spent a lot of time 25 years ago learning to love BSD in general, but FreeBSD in particular. I tried to make DragonflyBSD my desktop OS for a time. It’s sad how little love BSD gets nowadays…especially given how much of modern iOS / macOS owes BSD (for BSD subsystem that’s on top of the Mach kernel).
    by fluffypony
  • Is this the fluffypony of Monero fame? If so, I got into FreeBSD a bit after hearing you praise it on crypto podcasts back in 2017/18. Surprised your handle was still available on HN!
    by clanky
  • I use it every day as my desktop OS. Vanilla FreeBSD even, not dragonfly.

    I like it because it's so stable. They don't have this Linux thing where they have to change everything around to incorporate the latest fad, and there's also not so many big tech companies constantly messing with the code. Linux has too much corporate influence for me. I don't want Huawei or Amazon to be messing with the code I run all the time. The grassroots nature of Linux is kinda gone and the suits have taken over, just like with the internet itself.

    I also love how the OS is stable but the apps are rolling. This really helps to be on the latest KDE etc. And the documentation is excellent. ZFS on root as a first class citizen too.

    There's a small team of maintainers working hard to keep everything going in this age of increasing linuxisms. But so far they've been doing a great job.

    by wkat4242
  • I really wanted to love FreeBSD. Growing up in grade school my friend's older brother was a contributor and I thought he was the coolest guy ever. I loved the ethos and I agreed with this post. But practically, I just ran I into too much pain.

    - firewall? Lots of pain and hard to find friendly, best practice starter templates. Wherever I looked, people said "it's complicated." After a lot of tinkering and learning I finally got a setup that was pretty safe. (I think.)

    - pm2 was buggy on FreeBSD because of some issue with process IDs getting lost. That was pm2's fault, not FreeBSD's. But I still wanted to simply run different processes and keep my logs somewhere. Well, I guess I could write rc.d scripts for that. But keeping logs from the processes started by rc.d scripts? That also appeared to be a world of pain, and wherever I looked for answers people said "it's complicated."

    In the end, it was just too much having to re-invent the wheel for common server tasks and I had to say goodbye. It's not you FreeBSD, it's me. I'm just not an OS dev.

    by adamddev1
  • I had similar issues with it. What helps today are LLMs. It’s really a boon to configuring such things. You do it on ace and forget unless that’s your job. Did you try to do what you had wanted back then with a recent LLM?
    by jmaker
  • - firewall?

    PF seems to me like pretty much the most well regarded firewall there is - with a nice, sensible DSL for config. If you don't like like it, you can use use IPFW or IPFILTER, which are alternative, built-in, firewall front-ends.

    - In the end, it was just too much having to re-invent the wheel for common server tasks

    Maybe you have built your routine around a system that have reinvented the wheel? I think FreeBSD knowledge degrades more slowly than that of Linux distros.

    - I'm just not an OS dev.

    That's how I feel when I enter the chaotic Linux world. Do you think my life revolve around keeping up with this shit? :)

    by laxd
  • https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/firewalls/
    by rabf
  • > - firewall? Lots of pain and hard to find friendly, best practice starter templates. Wherever I looked, people said "it's complicated." After a lot of tinkering and learning I finally got a setup that was pretty safe. (I think.)

    I don't use much FreeBSD these days, but pf (from OpenBSD, I know), is one of the best things since sliced bread.

    In my first job I was working for a company selling a third-party vertical software and we were proving support for it. We were using a very expensive symantec vpn with most customers connecting with a 33.3kb phone connection, until we reached the license limits, and there was no money for new licenses. In a pinch, me and a coworker set up a new server with openvpn, freebsd, pf, and a ruby-based dns server that I don't remember anymore, and we grew an order of magnitudes more customers.

    It's been more that 20 years, I still don't know how to use firewalls in linux, (there are many, I just pretend they don't exists) but I would still be able to setup a pf firewall if needed. I need to say it again, pf is a joy to use.

    My gripe with FreeBSD right now is that I miss something like docker swarm. bhyve is fine but AFAIK it works only on a single host. Give me something that works on a bunch of hosts, and I will come back right away

    by mrighele
  • > - firewall? […] Wherever I looked, people said "it's complicated." After a lot of tinkering and learning I finally got a setup that was pretty safe. (I think.)

    I felt this way about pf when I first got PF going around 2011 for my home router/firewall box. Not saying this is the same for you or anyone else, but my issue was that I was approaching it from the point of view of “I want to configure a home firewall router with PF” instead of “I want to learn the fundamentals of what a firewall does”.

    It took me a few more years to get well-versed in all that stuff: the structure of packets, what NAT actually means (what addresses are being translated, why, and where), what's going on in the state table, how to debug when things aren't doing what I expect, etc. Once I did it became much more straightforward to express in my `pf.conf` what I want to do, but you're right that doesn't really help new users.

    > Lots of pain and hard to find friendly, best practice starter templates.

    FreeBSD does include this, however! It's just implemented using IPFW instead of PF. Check out `firewall_type` key in `rc.conf`: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/libexec/rc/rc.conf?id=edad...

    For a very simple NAT gateway, one could set `firewall_type=simple` and then `firewall_simple_(iif|inet|oif|onet)(_ipv6)?` to configure the ISP-side and internal-side interface names and IPv4 and IPv6 network ranges for each.

    For a very easy single-machine firewall, one could set `firewall_type=client` or `firewall_type=workstation` if you want to host anything. For the latter, `firewall_myservices` and `firewall_allowservices` control what ports are enabled and who (other networks/IPs) have access to them

    For more details and to see exactly what each option actually does, check out `/etc/rc.firewall` where this is all implemented: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/libexec/rc/rc.firewall?id=...

    by Lammy
  • I run FreeBSD in my homelab, too! One reason is the stellar ZFS support, but the simple fun of doing stuff differently is definitely a thing, too. And I like FreeBSD jails.

    For me, the balance between all the overhead of the "cattle, not pets" approach and the manual way is the a README.md file for basic setup, and then having Ansible stand up the rest of the configuration. The host is configured as a Jail host, then individual services live inside the jails. Creating and configuring the jails is also done through Ansible. Overall, I really like the setup. I can individually SSH into each jail to allow easy debugging, I can snapshot the jails, and data lives on a special ZFS subvolume that I mount into each jail at "/bucket". This way, I can throw away the jail at any time, fire up Ansible, and have everything up and running again in no time.

    by avhception
  • I've done something like this in the past, it works really well. Have you used Poudriere? I never tried it, but it sounds promising. Ansible is a good idea as well. I just wrote some shell scripts that parsed a file with some packages and hooks to set up the jails.

    These days I have my FreeBSD server providing NFS for a k3s instance on a different box.

    by ahepp
  • If I didn't need CUDA support, I'd be on FreeBSD all the way. No systemd, built-in "containers" before they were cool, basically just good 'ole UNIX.
    by donw