BlendIT BSD Cafe - FreeBSD

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New CS Student: Migrating to FreeBSD - Questions about Service Management and Identity Management (blendit.bsd.cafe)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello everyone, I'm a first-semester CS student from Germany, currently switching from Fedora to FreeBSD on my desktop. I still run Fedora on my laptop. I work part-time at our university's data center, helping with the maintenance of an OpenStack private cloud because I am truly eager to learn how to operate systems.

I plan to repurpose my desktop as a server to host some services locally in my student dormitory. I'm excited about FreeBSD and hope that learning it will help me run and administer services with minimal effort long-term. It would be great to manage my own infrastructure while being confident that updates won't break my system or require relearning everything. I have several questions:

What are the recommended patterns for hosting multiple services on a single server like bsd.cafe does ? Should I create a new user for each service (e.g., Lemmy, Forgejo), or should I run them all under the same user with multiple jails?

Is there a good identity management solution for FreeBSD? In the Fedora/Red Hat communities, people tend to use FreeIPA, but I haven't found an equivalent for FreeBSD yet. I'd like to provide my friends with single accounts that would give them access to services like Forgejo and Lemmy.

Looking forward to your suggestions!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

FreeBSD ships with jails in the base system, those offer a nice way to isolate services. Its also realy easy to create one:

bsdinstall jail <empty folder>

This will guide you through the interactive system install for a jail install. Have a look in jail.conf, and maybe grab a sample config from the handbook. If that is a little involved, you could also install a jailmanager like ipcage or ezjail. (Truenas was a nice webui but wont get updates much longer) Combined with zfs datasets for the different services, you can even get different snapshot and backup options for the different jails and services.

Hope this answers some questions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

since i forgot to answer the identity part, to get single signon for the services, you can use somthing like keycloak, but not all services support oidc signin. if you need freeipa or AD, you can always use a bhyve vm

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/03/10/keycloak-on-freebsd/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

i think this might be worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3u8OtjfGFE

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Thanks a lot for this comprehensive answer! I will watch the talk now.

I didn't know that there is an interactive jail install. Thats very usefull.

I have one more question. Could I do all of this also on GhostBSD ? Or what would be the advantages of FreeBSD? My reasoning is that Ghost BSD is already configured for running a graphical user interface.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

ghostbsd is based on freebsd as far as i know, so most of it should the same but i habe not used it yet

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

yes it is based on FreeBSD. Then I will install it tomorrow. I have some Problems getting a graphical environment to run, although I haven't tried to fix my errors for too long.

Thanks , good night :)