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Interview With The FreeBSD Core Team
Gentu writes "OSNews features an ultra interesting and in-depth interview with three members of FreeBSD's Core team (Wes Peters, Greg Lehey and M. Warner Losh) and also a major FreeBSD developer (Scott Long). They discuss issues from the Java port to corporate backing, the Linux competition, the 5.x branch and how it stacks up against the other Unices, UFS2, the possible XFree86 fork, SCO and its Unix IP situation, even... re-unification of the BSDs."
With BSD, or most any other Unix system including Linux distributions, you get a time-tested and proven base upon which all the system's services rest. You get a well-understood system upon which hundreds of thousands of people have built upon, and millions of people have hands-on experience using. You get not only an operating system, but a thoroughly proven model for maintainability, ease of administration, and security.
Windows 2003 Server is a new and unproven offering from a company whose past successes in marketing have been dwarfed in the public eye by the harms due to their failings (see, e.g., Nimda, SQL Sapphire Worm). Nobody has years or even months of experience on Windows 2003 Server, and its frequently accurate technical documentation cannot match the depth of understanding which Unix professionals bring with their platform.
You could choose Windows 2003 Server, and your staff might be able to make it work for you. But what will you do in two years? BSD, Linux, and the rest of the Unix heritage will still be going strong -- but if history is any guide to the future, Microsoft will be running ads touting Windows 2005 Server, a new and equally unproven platform, and telling you that 2003 Server is a piece of unstable trash. What kind of a future is that for your business?
I wish I could find this webpage again. (Google's not responding and I'm too busy to wait.) Anyhow, some guy had a great quote which IMHO accurately summed things up as far as free operating systems go. Went something like (in random order)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Not for everything. Windows beats Unix if you want to run Photoshop. :) I was talking specifically about server systems, where reliability and understandability of the system is crucial. I think the Unix edge is not merely the Unix architecture, but also the history and deep understanding which Unix professionals bring. It just isn't possible for a culture to have that kind of deep understanding of a system that has just been released -- no matter how featureful it may be.
To be snarky about it: On Unix systems, novices know they have no idea what is going on, and experts know that they know what is going on. On Windows systems, novices think they know what is going on, and experts know that they do not know what is going on. That may make Windows experts more Socratic ("Socrates is wisest, because he knows that he knows nothing") -- but I would not want my enterprise database dependent upon Socrates.
... huge make install nightmare.
/usr/ports/java/jdk13. /usr/ports/distfiles. /usr/ports/distfiles.
Huh?
Steps for native JAVA on FreeBSD:
1) cd
2) Execute make.
3) Download patch file from URL make provided into
4) Execute make.
5) Download source from URL make provided into
6) Execute 'make install'.
It is a little troublesome but still quite easy.
Thats the problem.
I have not done system administration for a couple of years but non journaled raid volumes take hours and not seconds to do FSCK. NT4 and Novel servers with close to a terrbyte of data before journaling came around took 4 to 6 hours to reboot after a crash. That costs tens of thousands of dollars in lost time. About a years salary for some of the IT workers.
I have also seen FSCK unable to repair damaged ext2 filesystems after they became corrupted. Its not perfect and its only a last resort after shit really hits the fan.
Were not talking about your home pc but a real enterprise environment. If the BSD developers want to move into this area they need to implement some of these features that Unix and Linux have. I can not convince my boss to use FreeBSD at work until it has this feature. Evem though FreeBSD is more stable then Linux. Also I do not get the argument of stability with journaling filesystems? Ever reliable os on the planet now has one without problems. It can not be that bad. All I know is in case of a power outage I absolutely need to have the disk working in seconds upon reboot without data corruption.
You trade off performance for reliablity with soft updates. It seems soft updates are trying to implement some of the features of raw i/o which FreeBSD is lacking in that Linux and Unix have as well. Its conservative is making if fall behind even though it does guarantee its stability.
soft-updates!= journaling.
http://saveie6.com/