Re: Best Linux version to port from OpenServer 5.0.5/6
From: Bill Vermillion (bv_at_wjv.comREMOVE)
Date: 11/15/03
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Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 01:35:01 GMT
In article <bp3495$683$1@news.tdl.com>,
Justin Robbs <justin_robbsNO@SPAMhotmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> If you want stable and small footprint, I suggest FreeBSD.
>I've found it
>> very easy to install/use and it has good driver support.
>Another bonus is
>> that it actually is free!
>>
>> Just a suggestion,
>> Fabio
>I hadn't thought a whole lot about BSD. I don't know much about
>it other than it is pretty similar to Unix, it was developed at
>Berkeley, and it is considered to be the most secure OS out of
>the box (ie. without patches and security tweaks). Does anyone
>have any suggestions about BSD vs. Linux?
I do - and so do many others.
I just really like the clean design and predictability of FreeBSD.
The team does an excellent job of keeping everything where it
belongs, and you can totally upgrade the OS and not touch anything
else with no problem.
That's because only the OS is on /, and everything else is on it's
own partitions. During a system reinstall the /etc is saved and
you can put back the old one, rewrite your config files, or merge
them.
On a fast system I can build then entired OS from sources in 25
minutes. A kernel build - using the newly built modules but not
yet instaled on the system - takes about 1 min. Install the kernel
in about 30 seconds.
Reboot and see if the kernel is OK, go to single user and install
the entire OS - about 3 minutes on a fast machine and 15 on
something like a 200MHz P5.
Then you run the merge program to coalesce your config files in
/etc - which is the most tedious part - usually about 15 minutes if
you do that, reboot and you are done.
I've rebuilt the servers remotely with no problems. Documentation
is about the best there is. Some of it is so good that Linux uses
many of the pages as is with just a search/replace on the OS.
I've found some things in Linux don't seem to be 'fail safe'
xinetd bit me recently when I got a call that a system was rebooted
because power failure outlasted the UPS and nothing would come up.
No mail, they have many who telneted in for mail too and telent
was gone. I was able to get with ssh as I had installed that.
Upon examing things I found that everything that xinetd was to
start was not started. I fired it up manually, everyting started
and then immediately died.
A little man page persuing and I found the flags to log inetd,
and ran it, and watched everything startup and then stop.
I looked at the log and saw 18 or 19 things start up, and then when
the ftp daemon tried to start it failed, and xinted bailed out and
took down everything it had started. To my way of thinking only
the problem service should have failed to start.
I traced it to a corrupted startup script with a wrong parameter
in the xinetd tree.
Granted, that's only one thing - but something that should never
happen IMO. But then again I came out of the broadcast industry
where if something was 10 seconds late it could mean thousands of
dollars lost as that time can not be recovered. That's why on big
things like live football there are dual systems running for
commercials and if one fails the changeover is instant.
So I guess it's where you are coming from as to whether you
tolerate things like that.
At an ISP years ago I moved everthing off of very expensive SGI
machines - eg in the $15k range each with RISC processors and the
genunine Netscape servers, into FreeBSD [2.6 at that time I think],
with apache, and found the performance easily doubled. Part was
the slimmer OS and of course Apache was cleaner than the Netscape.
But 3 $2000 machines were far cheaper than the one $15K machine and
the two $10K. The same could be said for Linux - but that was in
1995 and I've never seen a reason to change.
However I have no clue as to how they would work in a POS.
That's one area where SCO seems to shine and many are using it.
But for servers directly on backbones I really like them.
So that's a data point of 1.
Bill
-- Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com
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