Who knew? PC-BSD, a ‘User Friendly’ version of FreeBSD really is a popular OS. By popular, I mean it gets used by people. What made me come to this conclusion? Well recently I noticed that I had about 5TB monthly bandwidth that wasn’t getting used. To get the most out of my hosting, I decided I would act as a mirror to a open-source project. So, I decided PC-BSD would be a good starting point to see how it all goes. I rsync’d the files, and published my mirror data to the world. I expected PC-BSD to use about 25GB bandwidth/month at the most, because I was just added to a large list of existing mirrors. I was, however, wrong.

Yes, 638.7 gigabytes of data was transfered in PC-BSD image files. Thats roughly 1000 downloads, in half a month. So, clearly I under-estimated the scope of this project.

If you don’t know what PC-BSD is, Ill give you the skinny. Its like I said, a ‘User Friendly’ FreeBSD distro with a few distinctions. It has a graphical installer, vs the Text based one that FreeBSD comes with. It also configures the GUI (with KDE) automatically, so you don’t need to add an X-Windows system separately, it does all the work for you. Finally, it comes with automatic installers for many popular applications. So, if you are interested in checking out PC-BSD, visit their site, and you can download directly from my mirror @ the PHP Site Network’s node5.