Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 15:21:22 -0600 (CST) From: Alec Kloss <alec@d2si.com> To: jlustig@title9sports.com Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Using FreeBSD as intranet server Message-ID: <199703102121.PAA23247@d2si.com> In-Reply-To: <33246BCF.554A@title9sports.com> from Jon Lustig at "Mar 10, 97 12:15:11 pm"
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Jon Lustig is responsible for: > I've been looking at products by Whistle communications > (www.whistle.com) and I-Planet (www.i-planet.com). These are both > FreeBSD boxes that function as routers for dial-on-demand connections to > an ISP and as intranet-type mail & WWW servers. > > I've been talking with both of them for a couple of weeks and after > looking at the FreeBSD Web page, I've started to wonder if this isn't > something I could do myself. > I'm not too familiar with UNIX (I know "ls" and "login" and the internet > commands) but I'm really smart and I've worked with a variety of OSs, so > I get the general idea. What do you think? > Also, what do you think of using a FreeBSD box in this context? > Does > it make sense to you? > > TIA for any advice on this. > > jon > jlustig@title9sports.com > Hi. To give you a little background, I maintain a small network of FreeBSD, OS/2, Linux, Windows 3.11, Windows NT, and Windows 95 systems and also work on HP 9000, RS/6000, Sun Sparcstations, and SGI Indys at a few places, which has given me some perspective about this. Quite honestly, professionals do not do a particularly good job; I remember home directories NFS mounted on /tmp_mnt for months on end; I remember tcsh vanishing or moving occasionally, screwing things up, etc. I've not seen anything that more expensive commercial operating systems have that FreeBSD doesn't, except maybe a bunch of useless printed documentation. FreeBSD seems to be easy to support, the man pages are helpful, apropos works (it doesn't on a RS/6000 I know of) and there is a structured way you can ask questions of other experienced FreeBSD sysadmins. FreeBSD is also cheap which makes me happy. If you decide each department in your organazation needs its own UNIX server, you are not out $30,000 a crack in hardware. Likewise since FreeBSD is based on IBM PC archtecture, hardward support and parts are more available that with some commercial vendors. To get yourself started, I'd guess that you'll need some serious time to get used to maintaining UNIX systems. You'll probably need a spare FreeBSD box to run experiments on. However, you typically need that with any vendor's equipment if there are more than a few users on a system. Because the hardware is so much cheaper, you can afford two systems, one to test and experiment on, and one for people doing real work. My opinion is that FreeBSD is perfectly capable of doing the things that you want it to, and if you spend enough time with a few (okay, many books) you certainly can become a UNIX guru and have a cool free software based network. You can also use FreeBSD as a file server for windows and macintosh clients using software like samba and CAP. I'm experimenting with samba and haven't had an opportunity to try out CAP (yet).
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