Date: Wed, 5 Jun 1996 09:00:01 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: coventry@io.org (graydon hoare) Cc: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: feature list Message-ID: <199606051400.JAA08889@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <199606051141.HAA01264@io.org> from "graydon hoare" at Jun 5, 96 07:41:54 am
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> Hi y'all. I know there is an official FAQ feature list, but I am
> attempting to gather information to present an accurate comparison
> between FreeBSD and Solaris/x86 as ISP OSs'...
Forget Solaris/x86. If you are going to run Solaris, run it on SPARC.
> Was wondering if anyone could confirm for sure the day-to-day operation of the
> following services under FreeBSD and possibly comment on their ease-of-build
> and reliability, either alone or in comparison to Solaris/x86 if you have
> experience with it:
>
> BIND/NAMED
> GATED/ROUTED
> Usenet/INN/UUCP
> Sendmail/SMTP
> Apache/HTTPD
> Ftp/TFTPD/FTPD
They all work well under both OS's.
Given that, you have to examine the merits and disadvantages of each.
I'll be blunt. Hopefully nobody takes anything personally.
You (can) get support from Sun with Solaris. I'm not sure if that's a
benefit or a disadvantage. You get support for FreeBSD from Usenet, the
mailing lists, or your local FreeBSD hacker. It is an advantage if it works
:-) I have about 80% success getting FreeBSD problems resolved. Of course
out at MEI we have a Solaris Advantage Plus support contract and I have
about a 20% success rate getting Solaris problems solved through Sun.. hmm
You get source for FreeBSD for free. You get source for Solaris for a very
large sum of money. Having access to both, I will suggest that I prefer the
FreeBSD sources. :-)
FreeBSD is actively growing and comes from the same type of relatively
non-commercial development environment that spawned the software packages
you mentioned above. You are encouraged to participate and be part of the
process. It would be a cold day in hell before you can get a "fix" or
"patch" you came up with included in Solaris.
Sun has a full time fleet of engineers developing Solaris. FreeBSD has a
rather varied set of participants, most of which work on it part time.
Sun has a less aggressive timeframe for OS releases. FreeBSD has a more
aggressive timeframe that is rarely met (but still better than Sun).
Sun has a nifty system to manage components of their system, which is
supposedly a great benefit during an upgrade. FreeBSD doesn't and at least
me, myself, I find FreeBSD upgrades to be less traumatic because I don't end
up worrying about which things might have broken, and where they are buried
away.
Sun makes decisions based on perceived trends in the marketplace. Favorite
sore points are the "4.1.3 end of life" (after which they bowed to pressure
and released 4.1.4), the constant removal and re-addition of functions in
their C library, and other gratuitous changes. FreeBSD developers tend to
make decisions based on historical and religious issues, and in my opinion
manage to develop a more stable system with a clear sense of direction and
purpose.
Solaris costs. FreeBSD doesn't.
FreeBSD's performance on a platform will generally far surpass Solaris.
Solaris is slow and piggy. I have run both FreeBSD and Solaris on various
machines. My favorite was a 386DX/40 with 16MB RAM and a decent SCSI
system. FreeBSD and X11 ran OK. It was not "zippy" by any means but it was
quite useable and one could compile things and do simple things without any
perceived bogginess. When I tried to load Solaris alongside it, it blew the
disk geometry and overwrote my FreeBSD partition, and was very painful to
use. Getting OpenWinblows to run was like sheer agony. Don't even consider
actually DOING anything :-)
I attribute this to the zillion levels of indirection that appear to be
present in every portion of Solaris. Generality is a good thing but too
much generality slows you down.
Solaris has lots of commercial software. Look again and you'll see
much/most of it is for SPARC. FreeBSD has a lot of noncommercial software
(well Solaris does too)...
Sun SPARC is a well built, well designed platform. It is UNUSUAL!!!! to see
hardware incompatibilities or other bizarre problems. The PC world is very
perilous and you must select your hardware very carefully. Try expanding a
PC to 256MB of RAM. You'll want a Triton-II MB, but they don't MAKE 64MB
SIMM's that will work... (current gripe of mine).
Solaris has lots of cool things not available under FreeBSD..
PrestoServes (SPARC only), Online DiskSuite, extensive performance
monitoring tools (that very few people know how to use), WABI, real
threads, etc.
Some people will claim that system X is less buggy. I'll make a generic
counterproposal and say it's not true. All OS's are buggy. I have seen
extremely {un,}stable {Solaris,FreeBSD} systems. You have to commit the
time and money to create a stable system. Sun has a win here because you
can pay Sun to do it for you.
For the kinds of things I see an ISP doing, I can perhaps make a case for
SPARC Solaris. I have a real hard time seeing Solaris/x86 over something
like FreeBSD though. FreeBSD supports all the things you want for providing
Internet information services, and does so very well. Why pay for something
that will do the same things, but slower?
There are, therefore, two basic categories:
Money to burn: If you have money to burn, go the Sun SPARC route, get a
really fast machine, purchase full support, and never worry about it again.
Cost conscious: If you are trying to be cost conscious, consider FreeBSD
and a well designed and researched PC platform.
Putting Solaris on a PC platform is a combination of burning money (OS)
and cost consciousness (platform) that does not make sense to me.
> Also: has anyone loaded their OS from the network or have you found the
> CDROM from walnut creek to be a better route?
>
> thanks very much for your time and input.
> -graydon
I set up a local FreeBSD archive and I always install via ftp from it. The
net install is very nice, I'm guaranteed to have a network on any machine I
build, I'm virtually guaranteed not to have a CDROM :-)
You can set up Solaris to load from the net too. SPARC isn't too bad but I
gave up and threw up my hands in disgust at the x86 attempts.
... Joe
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/546-7968
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