alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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.
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.
> And I like FreeBSD jails.
If you don't know about them already, you may be interested in service jails (forthcoming[1] in 15):
> A service jail shares the complete filesystem tree directly with the host (the jail root path is /) and as such can access and modify any file on the host, and shares the same user accounts with the host. By default it has no access to the network or other resources which are restricted in jails, but they can be configured to re-use the network of the host and to remove some of the jail-restrictions.
* https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/#service-ja...
* https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/#service-ja...
* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=rc.conf&manpath=Fr...
[1] https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.0R/schedule/