Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 19:38:41 -0400 (EDT) From: CyberPeasant <djv@bedford.net> To: jer@hughes.net (Jeremy Domingue) Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG, stable@FreeBSD.ORG, smp@FreeBSD.ORG, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Disgruntled Linux User... questions about FreeBSD Message-ID: <199807132338.TAA02118@lucy.bedford.net> In-Reply-To: <009501bdae88$70e84f20$6e2f87d0@ws-47-110.selectaswitch.com> from Jeremy Domingue at "Jul 13, 98 11:02:45 am"
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Jeremy Domingue wrote: [Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...] > Hey all... > > tale of woe snipped... > Finally, to my questions about FreeBSD: > > 1) First and foremost, I am wondering what issues I will face being a user > very accustomed to linux. I know there will be differences between linux and > FreeBSD, but can anyone outline some of the major ones? Well, BSD is BSD and Linux is SysVish. You will find system startup procedures different. There are different systems calls, and slightly different file system semantics. There are a few conventional differences in where files go. (Mail folders in /var/mail, not /var/spool/mail, man pages in /usr/share/man, not /usr/man... stuff like that). These are all minor things. Ease the transition by using bash as your shell. Applications stay the same, by and large. Sendmail is sendmail, BIND is BIND. X is X. Apache is apache... > 2) Is there a way I can install FreeBSD without losing all of the stuff on > the server right now such as user files, web pages, programs, etc? And > possibly keep linux on there somewhere in case I ever decide to go back? Not a problem. See the webpage www.freebsd.org. Essentially, you need some free primary partition. FreeBSD will read your linux partitions just dandy. (You'll need to build a kernel for this, though, I think). Linux Intel binaries can (with some exceptions) be run efficiently under linux emulation. > 3) Is anyone using SMP on FreeBSD with an Adaptec 7880 on-board SCSI > controller? Linux people keep telling me that this is not a good > configuration for Linux... how about for FreeBSD? I don't know about the SMP aspects, but for single processor use (in my case PPro 200), the 7880 has been the source of no problems. My impression from the list is that this is a "good" SCSI card/chip. Again, how that impacts on SMP, I don't know. > 4) I know that the current build of FreeBSD is listed as development and > should not be used in a mission critical environment, however, what are > people's experiences with it so far? If it seems to be fairly stable, I > would be willing to give it a shot... I really need the SMP support. don't know. Try it single processor with 2.2.6-RELEASE and see if you /really/ need SMP. *BSD* is rumored to work better under load than Linux. ;-) You'll probably want to tweak up a custom kernel, anyway. > 5) Are there any other problems or issues I may face with my hardware > configuration (listed below)? The only problem I see is with the NIC. If it's a 3C905B, there's trouble: not yet supported. Tell the list precisely what kind it is. I don't use a 3Com NIC of any type. Since you're a commercial site, forking out for a different NIC (Intel 100B seems to be the current "fave"), is a minor problem. > I would also be very interested in hearing from other previous (or current) > Linux users' experiences with FreeBSD, and what comments they may have about > the differences and advantages (especially stability-wise) to using FreeBSD > instead of Linux. I had very good stability experiences with Linux (lightly loaded machine, very very vanilla hardware); what drove me from Linux was the continual upgrade/configuration game. It seemed that, just to keep the machine in some semblence of "current" (i.e. bug removal) required a great deal of effort, newsgroup and mailinglist stalking, fussing with various packages/rpms/blah from a thousand places on the 'net. I had installed BSD (Open and Net) on other machines, and noticed that all I did with them was /boot them and use them/, that I just wasn't fussing around so much, that the machines that I could rely on weren't the one I was fooling around with. So I turned all the i86 hardware over to FreeBSD. Yup, no more configuration games. No more wondering which version of ld.so works this week. The BSD's behave much more like a commercial Unix: install, configure, test/checkout, put it into production. Then sit back and read the logs. There are no "distribution" nightmares or libc/glibc version shennanigans. The "distribution" is everything: kernel, source, userland. This may seem unimportant, until you realize how little of /your/ time and thought goes into using it. Slick, in other words. The other Linux misfeature that drove me away was the low quality and disinterest in the improvemnet of such unglamorous things as NFS, the r-commands, some userland security things. Despite the fact that the source code has been free for-- what? 10 years?-- linux still can't seem to read and write a unix filesystem. Why? Well, "ext2fs is superior! Use that! N.I.H.!" I don't think you can run an arbitrary *BSD* binary under Linux, either. "Just recompile it!" > Hardware Configuration: > > Gateway (formerly ALR) NS-7000 Server > Dual PII 266mhz > 512mb EDO ECC SDRAM (all from the same lot, same manufacturer) > Adaptec 7880 on-board SCSI controller > 3Com 10/100 Ethernet Card See above. > 2-4.1gb IBM SCSI hard drives Dave -- Sancho Panza: `Microsoft Windows NT Server is the most secure network operating system available.' Don Quixote: `You are mistaken, Sancho.' To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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