FreeBSD, Serving the World

In another indication that those advertising dollars made available by the BSDI merger are being put to good use, OS Opinion is running an article explaining FreeBSD. Nothing new if you're already a BSD afficionado, but it does explain most of FreeBSD's salient points in a easy-to-understand way. Perfect for trying to convince the boss that this "three dee bee ess" stuff you're using to keep the company running is up to the task.

Comments

Excellent

[howardjp]

Perfect for trying to convince the boss that this "three dee bee ess" stuff you're using to keep the company running is up to the task.

Excellent, I wrote it with one of my old PHBs in mind. :)

Re:Excellent

[howardjp]

It's been set several times and I just threw out the paper copy of the press release. Let me look for a minute...ahh, here it is. Unfortunetly, I do not recall the exact circumstances and they are not listed here. But, I think it was a new release of Red Hat, or a new release of Slackware, or a new release of FreeBSD. Possibly a combination of them. I wish I could be more help. Emailing one of the FreeBSD lists should get a response.

Re:Excellent

[pigpogm]

It was merely idle curiosity. Interesting press release, though - 1.39tb from a single server is pretty impressive. I'd assumed that was through a little 'server farm' or cluster.

10,000 simultaneous downloads? I wonder how many IIS handles before it leaks all it's memory away and falls over...

Re:Easy to Install?

[Matthew Weigel]

I thought it was about the same. My only problem was that the installer bombed out if you tried to add packages from within it, so you have to had packages afterwards.

Now OpenBSD, that was easy to install. Seriously, I mean that -- just because it's secure doesn't mean it's hard to install. The only difficulty is in the fdisk/disklabel setup, which is relatively straightforward (although very different!) if you've used Linux fdisk before.

The biggest difference between Linux and BSD installs is that BSD doesn't install the kitchen sink by default (hint: if you ever try a commercial UNIX system, they don't either). OpenBSD is moving towards 'install all the sysadmin utilities a person could want, and then let the sysadmin install the user utilities' -- nc, ssh, a decent ftp client, etc. -- but it doesn't install any editor but vi :)

BSDi Dollars?

[Arandir]

What's this about BSDi dollars being put to good use? I thought osOpinion didn't pay their authors...

Re:BSDi Dollars?

[howardjp]

Hey, you mean I could get paid to do this? Wow, Walnut Creek has been holding out on me :)

Re:BSDi Dollars?

[howardjp]

No money changed hands in the production of this article.

Re:BSDi Dollars?

[howardjp]

Correct. In fact, this article was written before the merger took place. As proof, here is an early version of the article I sent to -advocacy for comments on January 27th.

Re:Easy to Install?

[Arandir]

"My only problem was that the installer bombed out if you tried to add packages from within it..."

This was a bug in the initial cut of 3.4. If you read the errata at www.freebsd.org, they explain it, and how to get around it. 4.0 does not have this problem.

Re:Easy to Install?

[lomion]

The install for FreeBSD is relatively painless, there is a gui interface (no mouse though) for it, plus you can wathc the progress on another terminal or even do some stuff while it installs.

The setup afterwards sometimes takes some effort, mostly getting used to the differences between Linux and Freebsd(if your coming from the Linux world). Also only a few things are on by default.

Your best bet is to goto www.freebsd.org there is a HOWTO about linux to FreeBSD changes