Pete - Lots of Qs

Hello Allan and Kris!

I had been a Windows / DOS user for the last 24 years before the most recent Windows release.  Once the myriad of privacy issues came to light I began looking for some desktop OS alternatives.  Ever since I saw my college roommate using Linux 20 years ago I've been curious about Linux as the other *Nix's - I just didn't have a good excuse to explore them until now.

This interest also coincided with my discovery of Podcasts about 2 months ago.  One of the first podcasts i saw recommended by Reddit was Linux Action Show and the other various Jupiter Broadcasting shows - including Tech Snap.  On a recent episode of Tech Snap Allan plugged BSD Now which is whats lead me here.

I had thought that BSD was some fairly niche OS that didn't have much market share, so imagine my surprise after listening to your show for a few weeks and discovering how wide-spread FreeBSD actually is!  Not only does BSD have a lot more going for it than I imagined, but apparently I'd been using FreeBSD for the last several years on two of my most important network appliances - namely my NAS (FreeNAS) and router (pfSense).

Apparently I was really good at completely missing the little "FreeBSD" tags near the version line.

After a few shows I couldn't resist - I had to fire up FreeBSD and see what it could do.  So I spun up a VM on my Proxmox machine and installed Emby (an open source version of Plex) and so far I've been immensely impressed with FreeBSD.  So much so that I'm interested in replacing more of my home network infrastructure with it.

This leads me to my first (of several) questions:

1).  FreeBSD seems to default to, what for me at least, is a very unfamiliar shell - tcsh.  DigitalOcean had a nice tutorial for replacing tcsh with bash, but if I'm going to get into FreeBSD I feel like I should probably learn to use the tools that come as default since they were likely chosen for a reason.  But, is tcsh better than bash or is it simply more useful / powerful in FreeBSD?  And do you know of any good guides / cheat sheets for using tcsh, especially for someone who is (marginally) more familiar with bash?

2).  Once I get more familiar with FreeBSD, I was also interested in replacing my Proxmox install with bhyve.  My use case for a hypervisor is fairly limited - I basically just need the ability to run a few Linux / FreeBSD VM's as well as a single Windows VM with USB pass-through for a local printer.  Would bhyve be ok for this?  Also, does bhyve / FreeBSD have compatibility with Intel i350 network cards which allow PCI passthrough for individual ethernet ports?  I've found those cards exceptionally difficult to get working on Proxmox, which rather defeated the purpose of getting them.

3).  I've been looking into spinning up a DigitalOcean droplet and using it as a static IP for my home network.  My plan was to run nginix or apache and VPN back into my home network and use a reverse proxy so that I would be able to visit something like plex.mydomain.com or owncloud.mydomain.com and have external access to my internal resources.  I realize using Dynamic DNS is maybe an easier solution, but I'm already planning on having a VPS spun up for some off-site backups and a few other things, so using the static IP from the VPS seemed like both a natural fit as well as an interested project.

I tried making this work on Linux, but I realized two things very quickly - 1) I hate iptables, and 2) my networking and routing skills are exceedingly rusty.  Do you have any good guides for learning how to route traffic for my above plan using FreeBSD?  I really was having a difficult time with how to route access to my internal network over a VPN from the remote server, whilst still allowing external access to the server over HTTPS.

4).  FreeBSD really has inspired me a great deal.  I'm now a donor to the FreeBSD Foundation and am interested in trying to contribute some more in some way.  What programming language(s) would you suggest learning if someone was interested in contributing some code to the FreeBSD project?  Similarly, where would be a good place to jump in as a fairly novice programmer?

Thanks again for the podcast guys.  I really enjoy the in depth explanations of all the various patches and new programs that come up every week.  Even though I don't really understand everything (or really sometimes ANYthing) that you guys talk about, I love that you go over the information at all.  So many other podcasts seem more interested in philosophical debates than actually digging into problems or interesting applications and how they work.

-Pete