Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:02:42 -0400 (EDT) From: Dru <dlavigne6@sympatico.ca> To: Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org> Cc: "Drews, Jonathan*" <DrewsJ@cder.fda.gov> Subject: Re: FreeBSD Goals Message-ID: <20040715150128.H545@dru.domain.org> In-Reply-To: <200407152052.22655.nils@tisys.org> References: <4C88DC099E9AF945A6DA4D6FFA1865D17D742C@cdsx06.cder.fda.gov> <200407152052.22655.nils@tisys.org>
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On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Nils Holland wrote:
> On Thursday 15 July 2004 19:09, Drews, Jonathan* wrote:
>
>> 1) A robust way to make PPP connections through userland-ppp. I think
>> FreeBSD's userland-ppp is better than what exists in Linux. I have used
>> userland ppp with serial, USB and PCMCIA modems. In all three cases it
>> worked very well.
>
> Well, although this might be a slight bit off-topic to the OP's question, let
> me add that FreeBSD's user-ppp is one of the neatest things I've ever seen.
>
> I remember years back in some 6.x release of SuSE Linux when I was trying to
> get my ppp connection working. If I remember correctly SuSE used wvdial back
> then, and I sat for hours in front of my box getting it do do dial-on-demand
> as well as NAT the way I wanted it to. After some time I gave up on this
> wvdial thing and turned to pppd directly, trying to get the stuff done "the
> old way". Something similiar happened when I tried to get a PPP connection
> working in SuSE Linux 8.0 - it just didn't want to work the way *I* wanted it
> to.
>
> Now, when first gave FreeBSD a spin in 2000 (actually, I installed my first
> FreeBSD on January 1st 2000 - really ;-)), I was highly amazed that after my
> first attempt to customize /etc/ppp/ppp.conf to suit my needs, a ppp -nat
> -auto <profile_name> worked right away just the way I wanted. No problems at
> all.
>
> Why am I telling that? Well, before I came to FreeBSD, I assumed that stuff
> would be way more complicated there than it is on Linux. However, four and a
> half years later I absolutely cannot say that this is the case. I was
> positively impressed how well and easy everything actually works.
>
> Additionally, I really wouldn't want to miss the occasional cvsupping, make
> {build,install}world and portupgrade procedure. I've never been able to
> figure out a sane way to keep a SuSE system (for example) up-to-date without
> having stuff totally messed up after a year or so. With FreeBSD ... well,
> keeping it up-to-date is another thing that works really great. I guess the
> version I'm running on this machine here was installed more than two years
> back and I've recently brought it to 4-STABLE (after the 4.10 release) and
> updated my KDE to 3.2.3 without much aford and trouble...
>
>> From the software side, I think it doesn't take long until one really
> appreciates the "FreeBSD way" of doing things. The only thing that in my
> opinion might be a strong point for Linux is hardware compatibility. After
> all, we must admit that Linux happens to support some stuff that FreeBSD
> currently doesn't. This, however, is more of a point when you have to install
> it on existing machines. If you know up front that you'll want to use
> FreeBSD, you will of course base your hardware buying decisions on that fact.
> And then, there shouldn't really be any problems...
>
> Just my $ .02. ;-)
>
> Greetings,
> Nils
Gee, that sounds an awful lot like a "BSD Success Story" to me... If
you're interested in writing it up and sending it to me along with a bio
I'll make sure it's included in the pamphlet when it goes to the printers.
Dru
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