Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 11:25:46 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@atkielski.com> To: <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Tiny starter configuration for FreeBSD Message-ID: <00dc01c1612d$3f080f80$0a00000a@contactdish> References: <00c401c160e5$f0e1ed40$6600000a@columbia>
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Andrew writes: > Okay then... don't get near the switch marked > power. *grins* Being a former Microsoft system > jockey, I've got license to make that comment. Maybe, but I no longer find such comments amusing. There are too many clueless young males on the Internet who bash Microsoft gratuitously because it is the fashionable thing to do, or because they are ruled by emotion rather than intellect, and I'm tired of hearing their rants. You may not be in this category, but your comment certainly is in that category, and it is very tiring. > NT doesn't like being changed, period. I've never come across any operating system that is not destabilized by change. NT is no different from the rest in this respect. > Just make sure you get a card supported by > FreeBSD... avoid RealTek anything at all costs. I figured I'd get a 3Com card or something. Top-quality NICs are still pretty cheap, and I don't want to spend hours chasing down a problem only to discover that a bargain-basement NIC is causing my grief, so I'll just get a nice card and be done with it. I did the same for my switch yesterday: bought a 3Com instead of the unknown house brand because it was only about $10 more and I figured it would be far less likely to cause a problem for me. Predictably, it worked perfectly as soon as I plugged everything in. > Eh, shouldn't make too much of a different to NT. NT, like most operating systems, is configured to be relatively insecure by default. Even though I configured my machine as NT server and as a domain controller, I've shut almost everything down on the machine, since I use it mainly as a workstation. It is as silent as a tomb from the Net's viewpoint (almost). > But, if you run Samba or something that uses SMB, > you're going to see a pretty good performance hit > when transferring files from one machine to another > via "drag and drop". One of my intentions is to keep these two machines very distinctly separate--which rules out any of the warm-and-fuzzy "network neighborhood" interfaces for moving files between them. I'll use FTP (currently I used SecureFX on the Windows side for this) to move files; this way there can be no doubt about what resides where, or which file is moving to which machine. > In the time it takes to copy a file from a > Windows machine to a Samba share via Explorer, > you can do it three times via command line FTP. Yet another reason to keep things simple. Hopefully, having a 100 Mbps path between the two machines will help, too. > And people say that TCP/IP is inefficient... Yeah, but compared to what? All you really need is bandwidth, anyway. And TCP/IP is relatively low overhead on the processor side, compared to fancier protocols. > Same here... except that my "menagerie" has spread > out all over my desk, my living room and is slowly > creeping into my garage... I have only one room, most of which is already occupied by an overcrowded desk, so space is at a premium, so much so that it influences my buying decision. > Hmm... if I didn't have this d@mn flu, I'd consider > that to be flame bait. It surprises me that anyone would dispute this fact, except perhaps for the sake of pure argument, of the type so dear to young males (as mentioned above). Nothing competes with Windows on the desktop except the Mac, and thanks to decades of mismanagement by Apple, the Mac has been gradually losing ground since Windows first appeared. I don't think OS X will have any effect on that trend at all, even if it does have a UNIX base. > Hundred or so applications? *shakes his head* > Must be those Windows Entertainment Packs... *snickers* No, I do actual work on my machine; the applications are serious (and expensive) ones like Quark XPress, Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker, Visual C++ and Visual InterDev, and many others. I do have an old BEP somewhere, but I didn't count it in this total, since I never use it. > I see you haven't been patching it all that much. I don't fix things that aren't broken. > Sure, it can be stable... as for well designed... > I'd argue this until I'm blue in the face. No other desktop operating system has even come close to the excellence of design that Windows NT provided; it was a huge step forward in desktop OS design. Mainly because it was designed by developers with mainframe experience, instead of high-school students and geeks with six months of experience, like most previous desktop operating systems. > But, I'll also make the assumption that you're not > running it on cheap hardware and certainly not > trying to run it in SMP mode. I run it on a high-end HP workstation, 2x PPro 200 MHz, 2x 4.5 GB 7200-rpm Ultra-SCSI disks in pure NTFS, 384 MB RAM, etc. Not a high-horsepower system by current standards (although it was the state of the art when I bought it), but superbly designed and built to last. The horsepower and disk are more than adequate for my requirements. This is a production system, so I could not buy anything cheap. Anyone who buys cheap hardware for a production system will get exactly what he pays for, no matter what OS he runs. > This may sound like marketing, but I wouldn't call > 98 inferior to NT. I would, at least from an internal design standpoint. The Windows 9x architecture is of the high-school-student category; while it is a huge improvement over its 16-bit predecessor, it is still garbage compared to Windows NT, which is a _real_ OS. > They're built for different uses. Yes: Games vs. work. > When you say that, I'm sitting here cringing. Any > system that's been running for 10 years without any > changes, updates or upgrades is going to appear to > be extremely slow. Any system that runs the same software and hardware for ten years will be running at exactly the same speed after ten years as the speed at which it ran when it came out of the box. Software does not wear out, and hardware does not slow down over time. If you do not change, upgrade, or update a system, the software doesn't change, and so the performance doesn't change, either. This is why my desktop machine still runs just as fast as when I bought it five years ago, and this is why I see no need to upgrade it, even though it is supposedly much slower than more recent machines. > 10 years ago, we were marvelling at the 486 > DX2-66... now, we're running at speeds of 20-30 > times that. And it still takes just as long to get anything done, thanks to software that has expanded almost as quickly as the hardware. The net gain is roughly zero. However, if you were to run software from ten years ago on one of today's machines, it would indeed run 20-30 times faster. But most people never think of trying that. > Now, I understand what you're saying, that you > don't have to make sweeping changes to keep a > machine running, but you do have to make changes > to keep up with the times and issues going on... "Keeping up with the times" is just a euphemism for "putting money in a vendor's pocket." If you have a system that does what you want, you don't ever have to change it at all. This has been the philosophy in many mainframe shops for decades, but PC users are only recently starting to see the light. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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