On Mon, 17 Aug 2009, Sahil Tandon wrote:
On Mon, 17 Aug 2009, Guy wrote:
I'm considering FreeBSD as an alternative, but I was wondering what
people think of FreeBSD as a platform for Postfix. It's obviously not
as easy to maintain as Ubuntu, but it does have a reputation for
stability. Any thoughts, recommendations or experiences would be
appreciated.
Your statement about ease of maintenance seems ill-informed; how exactly did
you reach such a conclusion? FreeBSD is a fine platform for Postfix. This
and other postfix-users messages are delivered to you via a Postfix instance
running on FreeBSD. If you have questions about the OS, ask on the
appropriate mailing list and see http://www.freebsd.org.
I have little experience with Postfix, but have been using FreeBSD as a
server platform for the last 10+ years. I've generally found it to be
very easy to take care of and very compatible with your usual laundry list
of internet services (email, web, user auth, nntp, etc.).
This isn't an advocacy list, but since the question was asked, these are
my top reasons for using it:
-It's a unified OS that comes from one "vendor" - no picking a distro,
putting a kernel and some other bits together to make an OS. In short,
there's one source for docs, support, and developers. Some may find this
limiting, but for most server deployments, I find it simplifies things.
-Binary compatibility (ie: the ABI) remains constant across major OS
revisions. You can also maintain compat libs to run binaries built under
previous major OS revisions. This allows you to decouple your OS upgrades
from your local software upgrades if necessary.
-Using ports or packages for extra software enforces a separation between
the "base OS" and "locally installed software". This is where Linux has
frustrated me. I don't want stuff not part of the base OS landing in
/bin, /usr/bin, /sbin or /usr/sbin. I find that keeping the base OS apart
from installed applications allows for more flexibility in backup and
restore operations.
YMMV, etc. etc.
Charles
--
Sahil Tandon <sa...@tandon.net>
