FreeBSD Help Thread

[Nimsical]

I personally own a FreeBSD server.
On daily basis, I use an iMac and a MacBook for personal use.

So as far as that goes, I can say that I can handle a *BSD based system.
I'm not too good at troubleshooting, but I manage so I guess I could be a help to you if yo wanted/needed any.

I'm here for you.

 

[Seth]

I really dont know any one who used bsd...

Let alone anyone from qj....


Tho I have toyed with it just for fun... I sticking to gentoo..

 

[Hardrive]

Nimsical, is there a major reason why I should switch my Debian server to FreeBSD? Is there really THAT big of a difference?

 

[Seth]

I havent used Debian Etch yet but from sarge BSD boots much faster than Debian.( If you care at all)

Also if you really want to know just read all this

http://lwn.net/Articles/124697/( It a little old but still does give you some good info)

But for personal use it not going to be that much of a different..

 

[Nimsical]

Nimsical, is there a major reason why I should switch my Debian server to FreeBSD? Is there really THAT big of a difference?

It's all about faster performance.

Because when you get to it, (and I say this from personal experience) a
Debian server is a lot easier to maintain where a *BSD based one would give you a hard time when you want to update/upgrade anything.
FreeBSD isn't linux based, it's BSD. So you can't run all the *nix programs on it, however there are ports of most of the linux programs available and besides, you can easily port->compile most of the sources out there anyways. Even then, linux's libraries are ported to BSD (/ports/linux_base*) so there's no problem on this part whatsoever. A simple exception to all this would be Perl 5.10, it's still not stable enough for FreeBSD.

Then there's the boot speed efficiency of FreeBSD, which frankly, as a server admin I find very important.

Again, the good thing about FreeBSD is that you have control over everything and even then, you can let a lot of stuff be done for you, like installing packages instead of compiling everything from the ports directory. Although, I personally compile everything myself due to better performances.

At the end, you just need to figure out if you've got the time to take care of everything that goes on with your system. For instance, I have to constantly check for new port updates and see if I'm gonna need them or is it better for me to wait for other related libraries to be updated too. But again, this isn't a big deal - most of this process can be machinized.

I'm going with FreeBSD because I personally don't look at Debian as a challenge, and I like a challenge