I happened to notice that FlightAware was a FreeBSD Foundation contributor. Would you be willing to comment on how FlightAware uses FreeBSD?
Side note: What’s the probability we could someday see PiAware run on FreeBSD?
Thanks,
Erik
Hi Erik,
FlightAware uses FreeBSD extensively. It is our preferred server platform. Everything from our web servers to our backend PostgreSQL servers run FreeBSD. Only in a few instances do we use Linux; services that need the Oracle JRE, Asterisk servers with Digium hardware, and vendor-supplied virtual appliances. Hopefully we can start using FreeBSD for the Oracle JRE-based services now that 64-bit Linux ABI is in FreeBSD.
Why FreeBSD?
- We have three former FreeBSD Project members on staff here. Our CEO, our CTO, and myself.
- We find it to be rock solid. We rarely have issues with performance, instability, or unreliability. The network stack is fantastic.
- We like the development model.
Some random services we run on top of FreeBSD include Varnish, Apache, Postfix, DNS servers, PostgreSQL, and a lot of custom internal software.
As for the PiAware question, I’m going to let somebody more involved with he PiAware stuff reply. I can tell you that we did discuss some of the issues we’ve encountered this year at the BSDCan conference. I’m hopeful that some of the software issues can be ironed out.
Hope that answers your question.
- Sean Kelly, FlightAware Operations
There’s no particular reason that piaware can’t run on freebsd, you’d just need to build from source. There is some linux/debian specific stuff in there, mostly around the health monitoring, but that should gracefully degrade if it’s not available.
dump1090 apparently works acceptably on freebsd, though there’s a USB stack problem somewhere that drops enough samples to throw off mlat timing.