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FreeBSD 5.4 Review
gammelgul writes "Jem Matzan has written a review of the new FreeBSD 5.4 release on NewsForge. He writes about enhancements and the 64bit edition of the OS."
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One employee lost a whole project due to the OS corrupting the filesystem. ... A few days later I was looking for another job
So you were fired because you hadn't been making backups, right?
Real advice here: don't be a ding-dong and use a test-grade OS for a production-grade job. FreeBSD 4.x is production grade, and it has served me well for YEARS of uptime, no matter the tinkering I do to it.
Does anyone who actually has a service provider/network engineering job even care about these fbsd is dead/dying lines of thought anymore? FreeBSD has been quietly running a good chunk of the net for years. If your idea of a solid OS is something to run whatever the latest eye-candy is on your desktop then good for you, go compile Gentoo until you turn blue. For me, and a lot of folks like me, if I can run a web server that never fails, a DNS farm that never fails, mail servers that never fail, etc, etc then I could care less if my iPod doesn't automount or whatever other new technology isn't supported.
This is very weird. Submit a PR.
Could you please reference some sources for these problems?
I run half a dozen AMD64 boxes and I've had minimal problems running the following threaded APPS:
apache-worker-2.0.54
perl-threaded-5.8.6_2 (Just disable the port warning)
php5-5.0.4_2
Along with all perl modules compiled with thread support.
I've seen no stability issues.
I find it interesting that you mention using the AMD64 FreeBSD, yet say you're running it on EM64T. I was not aware that EM64T is actually considered to be an equivalent implementation of the 64bit code. Therein may lie your issue.
I run AMD64 on Dual Opterons without issue.
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
Everyone pleae stop reading reviews done by this guy. They're uninformative, biased, and it's blatently obvious he's unwilling to actually learn FreeBSD beyond installing it two or three times each new release and writing a review catering to the already pre-established opinions of Linux users.
scott
It looks like FreeBSD just tries to follow Linux
Actually Linux followed FreeBSD. While older, FreeBSD is also free'er (as in speech). That is its fundamental difference. Which is better entirely depends on what you want to do.
OMG, dense. Please get hit with clue stick.
... and it should all be done with minimul downtime, because their 15k visitors/day don't care what database the data is stored it, they just want the sht to work.
It's not because MySQL is a buzzword. It's because MySQL works, that's what their data is currently sitting in, and their web site it programmed to talk to MySQL.
Switching to PostgreSQL, or any other database, entails a lot of work. Reprogramming anything database specific, and moving about 20GB from MySQL to PostgreSQL without losing *any* data.
Common sense is not so common.
Anyway, here are my humble reasons for choosing FreeBSD over any Linux distro.
The main one is definitely the wonderful ports system. The only thing that comes close to it in the Linux world is Gentoo portage: I didn't try it, but those who did didn't find it as good.
The following four links (the Handbook and three excellent tutorials) contain everything one needs to understand and use FreeBSD ports
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/ports.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/07/FreeBSD _Basics.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/28/FreeBSD _Basics.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/09/18/FreeBSD _Basics.html
Another not-so-secondary reason is security.
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
And to me, a very important reason is also the license. I have a very strong preference for the academic licenses (BSD, MIT) towards the copyleft licenses (GPL, LGPL).
And it looks like I'm not the only one
Eric Raymond advocates BSD license over GPL (June 2005)
"Freedom and choice are pretty cool. But we should talk about many other things. GPL is based on the belief that open source software is weak and needs to be protected. With it, we continue injuring ourselves, cutting ourselves from the economic benefits of BSD license".
Btw, it seems that *somebody* is sharing my preference, since FreeBSD is used on web servers much more than any Linux distro (2.5 million active sites, against 1.6 million of Red Hat). And from Netcraft numbers (June 2004), FreeBSD had a 25% increase in the last year.
/. BSD section, in the latest 20+ news items, only 2 (two) are about FreeBSD (the 5.4 release, and this piece of crap), notwithstanding its huge user base.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/06/07/nearl y_25_million_active_sites_running_freebsd.html
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/03/14/fedor a_makes_rapid_progress.html
I know, facts like this one are little known on Slashdot - for a reason, I'm afraid. The same reason why lousy "reviews" like this one get produced by NewsForge and posted on Slashdot (they belong to the same company), and the same reason why in the
That alone says that FreeBSD is a strong Linux contender: if it weren't, there would be no point in obscuring it.
Btw this is an observation, it's not a complaint. FreeBSD has already shown that it can thrive even without the hype.
--
Requiem for the FUD