I want to run GoToSocial on some *BSD system. Because I am who I am, I went for using NetBSD 10.0 . And because my hypervisor is running bhyve on OmniOS , you get the title of this blog post.
Don’t get too anxious, it is quite straightforward. So let the journey begin.
↫ Joel Carnat
Bhyve is a hypervisor originating from FreeBSD, while OmniOS is a distribution of illumos, a continuation of the last open source Solaris release from Oracle. GoToSocial, meanwhile, is an ActivityPub social network server, so it belongs in the same family as Mastodon, Glitch, Akkoma, and countless others. This guide makes this whole process look like a piece of cake, so if you’ve ever been interested in running your own ActivityPub server – read on.
On a slightly related sidenote, there’s no OSNews AT instance, partly because I don’t want to deal with the moderation and costs, and partly because I’m incredibly happy being a member of Exquisite, a Glitch instance running on OpenBSD, managed by OpenBSD enthusiasts. Never say never, of course, but the odds of seeing an OSNews AT instance in the future are very slim.
I understood some of those words.
The older i get, the more i identify with Grandpa in this meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DlTexEXxLQ
I have a computer running OmniOS at home, and I’ve created native Illumos zones and Bhyve VMs, and it’s interesting to see how the same framework originally added for zones was extended. If your software is supported, it is really easy to create a ZFS dataset, create a new virtual NIC or use an existing spare interface, and create a sparse zone and give it an IP. Suddenly you have a light-weight OS image you can login to and install software to that’s a container and not a VM. Running a Bhyve VM you can see how extended and how much extra is required of the zone admin and config. It’s still easy and pretty neat, but not as cool as native zones.