FreeBSD isn’t dead. Nope.
I run this webserver (dax.prolixium.com, a VirtualBox VM running on a bare metal server that I lease from Vultr in Parsippany, NJ) on FreeBSD as well as another test VirtualBox VM at home, trance.prolixium.com. Although it’s a less-than-scientific development environment, I usually try FreeBSD upgrades on trance before upgrading dax.
I did the trance upgrade from 13.2 over the weekend during some evening down time I had while in Sarasota, FL (visiting a family member). I did a source upgrade of the base system with a binary package upgrade. I used to do a 100% source upgrade, which included FreeBSD ports. However, over time the /build/ dependencies spiralied out of control (think multiple versions of llvm..) so I switched to binary packages.
The only quirks I ran into was that the first installworld failed with some ld-elf.so.1: /usr/bin/make: Undefined symbol "__libc_start1@FBSD_1.7" error. I ran installworld a second time and it worked. I’m guessing there’s some race condition or dependency error (I am using make -j1). Some folks on Lily indicated this is par for the course, although I haven’t encountered it before and I’ve been running and upgrading FreeBSD since 4.8. The other quirk is that openssh-portable seems to be gone from the available binary packages. As a result, pkg upgrade -f didn’t reinstall it to link to new libs and I ran delete-old- libs. After the reboot sshd was not running due to a libcrypto mismatch. I had to VNC in and switched to the OpenSSH from base. The only reason I used openssh-portable originally was because the OpenSSH version in base always lagged behind considerably but this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore since it’s 9.5. I’m still curious why openssh-portable was removed from the available binary packages—a quick wed search didn’t turn up anything interesting. I still see it in ports so I guess I could still build it from source if I wanted.
The trance VM runs WireGuard and FRR since I’ve had problems with that combination in the past (also OpenVPN and Quagga). I figured it’s a good soak and /fairly/ representative of what I run on dax, which I suppose I’ll upgrade in the next couple of weeks.