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August 2002 Daemon News Ezine Published

Posted by michael on from the your-ideas-intrigue-me dept.

questionlp writes "The August 2002 Ezine has been published and is packed with articles and columns with topics ranging from behind-the-scenes look at VicFUG 2002, a report on the recent O'Reilly OSCON, one's adventure through Unix starting from Linux to FreeBSD, a HOWTO on backing up FreeBSD with tar and SMBFS, plus a look at some of the most popular web browsers (most of which are available in the BSD Ports collection)."

3 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Upgrading once a week? Is he serious? by parc · · Score: 3, Informative

    Updating packages and update the system are two different things. A weekly portupgrade -a is one thing. A cvsup and rebuild of world weekly would be overkill.
    However, it's so easy to do, I could see people doing it.

  2. Re:Upgrading once a week? Is he serious? by Wdomburg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    >One comment in the Life After Redhat article stuck
    >out. He loves FreeBSD and his systems are
    >"upgraded once a week (all software)". Is this
    >normal pratice? I still have SuSE 6.3 systems
    >running.

    "Normal practice" varies depending on who you're talking to. :)

    On the networks I administrate, I have a strict policy of "no unjustified upgrades", which usually translates to applying only security patches and relevent bug fixes. It might include new versions of software if, and only if, we're rolling out an enhancement to our services that necessitates it.

    Part of the reason for being so restrictive is because we do QA and testing after every upgrade, so all upgrades have an associated cost in admin time. It may seem overly paranoid, but we've caught a lot of subtle issues that would have otherwise effected service to our customers.

    Matt

  3. Re:offtopic about your response to point 3 by Wdomburg · · Score: 4, Informative

    >FreeBSD is, in fact, THE free Unix. Linux is a
    >Unix clone. FreeBSD is based on Berkeley Unix, and
    >is thus, a direct decendant of the original Unix
    >source code, not a rewrite. Not that it matters
    >much.

    It doesn't matter, and it's not really accurate. FreeBSD is based on the 4.4-lite codebase, which is the version that removed the last vestiges of copyrighted USL (Unix Systems Lab) code from the Net/2 codebase released by Berkeley's CSRG (Computer Systems Research Group) as part of a settlement agreement in the lawsuit USL pressed against the BSDI and UCB. So yes, FreeBSD *is* a rewrite.

    And even that is somewhat irrelevent, since if you want to be pedantic about the term, UNIX is now a specification and operating systems which are certified to conform to that specification. None of the free Unixes have gone through the certification process, and thus are all "unix-like" and not UNIX.

    Matt

    (And just as one side note, even if none of the above was true, saying "FreeBSD is THE free Unix" doesn't make sense, since OpenBSD and NetBSD are also derived from the 386BSD codebase, and would therefore qualify under your definition.)