November 2, 2025
Jails, thrills, and firewall chills
Using FreeBSD to make self-hosting fun again
Self-hosters ditch the easy button for pure tinkering joy
TLDR: A self-hosting fan jumped to FreeBSD for the joy of learning and control, praising its simple docs and long-term stability. Comments split: some love the tinkering and nostalgia, others complain about firewall pain and modern hardware quirks—making this a passion project, not a convenience play.
A blogger ditched the usual tech treadmill and jumped into FreeBSD—an old-school, well-documented operating system—to make self-hosting fun again. Cue the comments section turning into a friendly brawl between nostalgia, pain, and pure tinkering bliss. One crowd cheered the throwback vibes: manuals from 2008 still work, jails (think mini sandboxes) feel neat, and virtual machines are just “little computers you spin up.” Another crowd threw confetti shaped like firewall errors.
The hottest take? Convenience isn’t the magic—learning is. SurceBeats said the spark comes from figuring things out, not pressing the “easy” button. But adamddev1 brought the rain: “firewall? lots of pain,” and begged for friendly starter templates. Meanwhile, fluffypony mourned that BSD—cousin to OpenBSD and the backbone beneath macOS—doesn’t get the love it deserves, despite powering pieces of Apple’s world. sehugg chimed in with a “it just worked” memory, while irusensei flagged modern hardware quirks like big.LITTLE chips (mixing fast and efficient cores) nudging them away from BSD.
The vibe? Tinkerers are thrilled; pragmatists are wary. Jokes flew about “grandpa man pages” that still slap and “BSD is the hipster OS.” The consensus: if you want joy and control, this path is sweet candy; if you want plug-and-play, bring patience and snacks.
Key Points
- •The author switched to FreeBSD to better support multi-purpose self-hosting workloads.
- •They acquired a server via Hetzner’s auction and set it up using BastilleBSD (jails) and vm-bhyve (VMs).
- •OpenBSD remains part of their workflow for routing and single-purpose VMs, but FreeBSD was chosen for broader workload separation.
- •They highlight FreeBSD’s simplicity, strong documentation, and long-term compatibility, noting older solutions still work.
- •The base system release cycle is separate from pkg and the Ports Collection; community support via the Fediverse helped clarify issues.