Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 12:21:34 -0700 (PDT) From: "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@nwlink.com> To: "Frederick J Polsky v1.0" <fred@fredbox.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD guide for Linux admins Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.96.1000912114428.12665B-100000@utah> In-Reply-To: <39BE7356.1301671A@fredbox.com>
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On Tue, 12 Sep 2000, Frederick J Polsky v1.0 wrote: > I'm installing a FreeBSD box in the midst of a Red Hat shop; the other > admins desire documentation on the differences between same. Might > anyone know of a suitable link which has quick-n-dirty info on the > administrative differences between FreeBSD and various Linucies or some > sort of "FreeBSD for Linux admins" guide? No links here. You use a linux system just like any unix system really. It's the macro scale where usage/administration diverge. There is some bias here. Read through it to see what variations I observed between FreeBSD and Redhat. The biggest thing from an admin side is that FreeBSD doesn't have Sys V init scripts. THANK GOODNESS. You actually have to give the command line invocation to start processes and you have to ps and kill processes to stop them. (Unless they are like apachectl.) If your admins are looking for a script to start sendmail tell them, "Umm, 'sendmail -bd -q30' works for me." ;) A HUGE issue during install is that Linux insists on using the DOS based partitioning scheme. FreeBSD is utterly more flexible in this regard. For a BSD only system there are none of the DOS fdisk limitations. If your admins are trying to use things like extended DOS partitions, they are not following the BSD mindset. (Obviously. this doesn't matter post installation.) BSD doesn't have the 128MB swap partition limit. Consider this scenario. You have 1024 MB of ram. You want 2048 MB of swap. That would take sixteen linux swap partitions. If DOS sticks you with 15 total partitions allowed, you are screwed, blued, and tatooed. (Maybe you could use swap on another disc. This difference boggles my mind.) I, IMHO, think it is sacrilege to install a GUI based adminintration tool. A couple books on Linux admin that I have seen depend utterly on things like linuxconf. This may or may not apply to your audience. Another BIG thing IMO is that there are no "glibc version of the month" issues. As a BSD-ite running Linux, this caused me great consternation until I became apprised of how to deal with it. Just tell your peers that they don't have to worry about library version in the base system. The ports system handles glib issues well all by itself. And ports! Ports are a jewel. You install BSD using ports and packages. Packages are merely the binary version of a port. A port is a source version of a package. They both use the same administration tools. The one thing I have seen that the ports system seems to lack is the ability to _easily_ pick an arbitrary file from the disc and find out what software depends on it. You can still grep the ports database for the pattern that matches the file you are interested in to see what software uses that file. Redhat will add a new group with each new users name by default. BSD will not. No big deal, just be careful to check your user adds after your done to see if they are what you expected. As a cultural issue, I think more BSD-ites build software from source while more Redhat users install binary RPMs. Basically, the FreeBSD system feels more naked to me. Redhat felt more covered up and insulated from the admin. Being who I am, I prefer naked computing! :) Thank you, Jason C. Wells To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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