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FreeBSD 5.1 beta2 Now Available

Posted by timothy on from the free-like-the-wind dept.

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded the 5.1 i386 Beta2 release of FreeBSD. He will be uploading the alpha release, work is under way to get a beta2 for sparc64 and pc98. Downloads for i386 are available here."

2 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Of course... by Dimwit · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you wanted to be nice to those folks at the FreeBSD project, you could always use a mirror.

    In fact, in the future it might not be a bad idea to have Slashdot only link to freebsdmirrors.org. I know that the FreeBSD people have gotten pissed in the past about that...

    --
    ...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
    1. Re:Of course... by edhall · · Score: 4, Informative

      Just because the server can handle the load doesn't mean that its network connection has the bandwidth. The OS is often irrelevent.

      In fact, in many cases of "slashdotting" the servers (whatever they're running) do fine, but the network "pipe" isn't big enough. There's a bit of a positive feed back loop as well, since the tiny bandwidth available for any given connection makes it slower, and thus take longer, and thus increase the number of simultaneous connections the server has to handle. The latter can be hell on database backends (a common failure mode when DB-driven sites are overloaded) and on a poorly-configured server can run it out of system resources as well.

      As for FreeBSD 5.1-BETA2, I'm sure it could handle the load, but it's not going to be as stable as FreeBSD 4.8, and the FreeBSD folks will freely admit as much. That's why it's "BETA," and it's also why the 5.x branch most likely won't be labeled "STABLE" until 5.2. Until then, the place to test it is as a member of a server farm, where if it does happen to have trouble the load will immediately be taken over by other machines. It really isn't appropriate to use beta software as a stand-alone FTP server. That doesn't mean that people won't try (just like there are servers out there running Linux 2.5). But it would be irresponsible to do this for any server that is mission-critical.

      -Ed