Ethereal Wake

Recently, I needed to hack together a quick server-side application for a test page. When it comes to quick and dirty, most people turn to Python. While Python is hardly my favorite language, it is certainly suited for the task.

One of my requirements was that I wanted to minimize the number of dependencies. Installing Python is bad enough (my nginx container is extremely bare bones), but installing a massive framework for what was effectively a wrapper around a system command would make things even worse. So I decided to make due with wsgiref.simple_server that ships with CPython.

On my home server, I use FreeBSD. Sadly, the BSD’s have been falling behind Linux in the past decade but they still appeal to many people and even have a few tricks left in them. Most notably, as Linux has been struggling with next generation file systems for a few years now, FreeBSD has integrated ZFS for over a decade.

While modern Linux distros become ever-more complex interplays of components, the BSD’s have remained relatively simple. Custom installation (by hand or script) is trivial when the system is distributed as a tarball or two versus a constellation of packages numbering in the thousands. Just boot into the live CD, format the file systems, unpack the tarballs, install the boot loader, and reboot into your new system.