i’m just finishing upgrading my different servers from FreeBSD 9 to FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE.

…and i just realized, that my FreeBSD adventure started around 4.1 (well, i may have got older 3.4 CDs, but didn’t install it then yet). and it was 14 years ago today. it was just after i, like thousands of linux users around the world, tried to upgrade glibc libs on the fly on my beloved (at that time and today) Slackware installation.

how many things did change from that time - docker rules, creating virtual instances is extremely easy and ‘cheap’ (we’re only lacking new IPv4 address space) and FreeBSD kernel has VIMAGE included by default. i’m getting older :)

on top of that i moved to cloud, but my own cloud - using great Bittorent Sync tool that works flawlessly on Macs, PCs and smartphones. there’s a lot of rumors that some of the most endangered portals like WikiLeaks or rPirateBay will be using similar techniques to distribute content in future.

i also cleaned up my desk a bit - thanks to essentialism book. next to 2 CPU Windows workstation i decided to put Mac Pro 2013 and get rid of two Mac Minis that were humming nicely only days ago.

128GB of RAM (yeah!) makes half of the difference - under VMware Fusion 7 you can run multiple heavier VMs, and Mac Minis were limited to 16GB only. also, native PCIe controller makes second half of the difference in useability - with RAID0 on two Corsair M550 SSDs in my MacMinis I could get to 700-800MB/s, the one in Mac Pro 2013 easily crosses 1GB/s.

so I’m scaling down. during last year from four PCs and six monitors i got down to three monitors and two PCs. context switching slows you down… and truth be told, most of the work I did this year was done on my MacBook Pro. “on the go”.

so… I hope I’ll be able to use all of those goodies for something good.