# New home system, need advice



## Bo Handskemager Sørensen (Jan 2, 2015)

Good evening everyone (20:01 here)

I'm building a new system for my home needs and need advice.

I've been using a Solaris 11 system on my old machine, which died mid-December.  The reason I'm here on this site is because of the similarities of the two OSes and Solaris has no ARM support.

The new system (and my old) is going to be used for quite a lot of tasks; Routing, Firewall, VPN, Web Hosting, Storage, TV Recording and Media Center for the household and I would like to use it as a personal cloud storage.

As mentioned, I'm going to be using an ARM server board (if I can find one with more than one PCIe slot) because of this and all of the other requirements, I only see 2 choices: FreeBSD and SmartOS, although I'm not certain SmartOS has ARM support at present. I'm designing and building the system myself (best mate is an electronics mechanic and brother-in-law a CNC machinist) so pretty much only leaves a few things left to figure out.

In my decision making process I need help on the software side, as I have no clue about anything besides Solaris, OS X and a little Windows.

I would like any suggestions about the FreeBSD (and if anyone has experience with SmartOS) and what software would be beneficial for my needs (OpenStack, LZ4 Compression, bhyve, ..?).

What makes FreeBSD good, what can FreeBSD give me and how easy is it to maintain vs other OS's (don't compare to Linux, never gonna use it as I think Linus Torvalds is both whiney and arrogant).

I know this is a lot to ask for but I'm really not sure what I should pick.  Help would be much appreciated.


Kind regards.


Bo Handskemager Sørensen
reclzznzz@gmail.com


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## tingo (Jan 2, 2015)

With FreeBSD; look hard at what is supported in ARM. It is still a Tier 2 architecture in FreeBSD. If I were you, I would also split the tasks over two machines (physical or virtual), perhaps keeping Storage, TV Recording and Media Center on one machine, and the rest on another. All eggs in one basket...
I don't know SmartOS, so can't comment on that.


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## Bo Handskemager Sørensen (Jan 2, 2015)

tingo said:


> With FreeBSD; look hard at what is supported in ARM. It is still a Tier 2 architecture in FreeBSD. If I were you, I would also split the tasks over two machines (physical or virtual), perhaps keeping Storage, TV Recording and Media Center on one machine, and the rest on another. All eggs in one basket...
> I don't know SmartOS, so can't comment on that.


Yeah, I can see I didn't mention it, I used one zone for Routing and another zone for web hosting so I get your "all the eggs in one basket" and thanks for the reply


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## Juanitou (Jan 2, 2015)

Maybe you already know it, but I'd start here: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm.


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