When people talk about containers in FreeBSD, they usually talk about Jails. We’ve already seen how this works in general here and here. An additional option you have, is to install Podman on FreeBSD. Podman is well known in the Linux world and can be used to build and run containers. With the release of FreeBSD 14.2, the FreeBSD project…
Now that we know how to work with the ports collection let’s have a look another option you have in FreeBSD: Sometimes it might be required to run unmodified Linux binaries on FreeBSD and to achieve this, FreeBSD comes with a Linux compatibility layer. This is optional and not enabled by default, but pretty easy to setup and use. Before…
If you followed the previous introduction posts about FreeBSD (here, here, here, here and here) you should already know how to install binary packages. On FreeBSD this is done using pkg, and if you are familiar with apt, dnf, or zypper (or any other package manager on Linux) this should not be a big deal. There is, however, another official…
This post builds on top of the previous post in which we’ve created a simple thin Jail. The goal of this post is, to put a bit of automation around this and to provide a simple PostgreSQL as a service platform. We want to do this by creating one PostgreSQL instance per Jail (without any restrictions on resource usage for…
Now that we know how to get started with FreeBSD, how to manage users and groups, and how to work with services, we’ll look a bit into Jails today. But before we do this, let’s look at what we have in Linux today when it comes to containerization and virtual machines. Obviously we can manage virtual machines, with either KVM…
This is the third post in the series about getting started with FreeBSD. We’ve looked at the first steps here, and users and groups here. Today we’re looking at how FreeBSD handles services. For those who still don’t like systemd the good news is: There is nothing like systemd in FreeBSD. For those who do like systemd the maybe bad…
In the last post, we’ve initially configured FreeBSD so that networking is up and running, additional packages can be installed, and the system was patched to the latest release. In this post we’ll look at how users and groups are managed in FreeBSD and what FreeBSD provides when it comes to additional security mechanisms. On Linux systems users are usually…
In case you follow the blogs here, you might have noticed that I got interested in FreeBSD over the last months (or even year(s)). The reasons for this are multiple: FreeBSD development is organized in very much the same way as it is with PostgreSQL. The license is very much the same. The history is really interesting as it goes…
The last flavor of BSD we’ll look at is NetBSD. We already had FreeBSD (here and here) and OpenBSD (here and here). If you want to learn more about the history of NetBSD and the goals of the project, head over to the about page on the official website. We’ll use the same structure as in the other BSD related…
In the last post we’ve seen that it is quite easy to get started with PostgreSQL on OpenBSD when you install from the provided packages. The downside of this was, that not the latest version of PostgreSQL was provided, 14.2 instead of 14.5, which is the current version as of today. If you want to stay more up to date,…
Almost all of our customers run PostgreSQL on one of the distributions of Linux, either installed from packages or from source code. But there is not only Linux, there a various flavors of BSD you can also run PostgreSQL on. So, if you want to have something more UNIX like, OpenBSD can be an option. This flavor of BSD is…
