On Thu, 6 Apr 2006, Gustafson, Tim wrote:
I have been using FreeBSD in a production environment for almost 10
years now (since version 2.2.5!) and have absolutely NO complaints about
it. I've regularly had servers with uptimes in excess of 6 months, and
even those were just rebooted for kernel updates and the like.
The ports tree is excellent, well-maintained and can be used as either
binary packages or source code updates.
Tim Gustafson
MEI Technology Consulting, Inc
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(516) 379-0001 Office
(516) 908-4185 Fax
http://www.meitech.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ What he said...
I started with 2.1.5, and haven't looked back. I use some linux boxes for
mostly workstation type use, in-house server here and there, but really no
production servers of mine run Linux (couple customers do, but not for my
stuff). Also run some Solaris boxes, Sparcs, no Solaris i386, hardware
support was atrocious in earlier versions, might be better now, but if I'm
running x86 (or x64), it's BSD or Linux. Was never a huge fan of redhat,
will one day try some other distros, when I have time (yeah, right), but
with FreeBSD, It Just Works, and no need to change.
The answer tho is use what you know, and feel confident working with. Use
what you know will get the job done, done right, time and again, and give
you and your customers the least amount of headaches.
FreeBSD is mainly more geared towards server use (IMO), set it and forget
it in the closet. It just chugs along, you never know it's there. My
uptimes are ridiculous, and they only go down when I upgrade system pieces
like the kernel or for critical security patches. Never had a base system
compromise (user installed software excluded) in over 10 years, never had
a system crash unless it was hardware or admin error (i.e servers never
brought to their knees by attacks), and I'll swear by it's reliability.
And the answer to other posts, FreeBSD has both source and binary upgrades
for both packages, and base system and security parts to my knowledge,
though I've only used the binary packages sparingly here and there,
everything else is source-built, including world (which is FreeBSD's
way of upgrading the system in place).
-Gary
