Re: Serious question: Is DragonFly's smp ISP-production-ready?

["Martin P. Hellwig" <mhellwig@xxxxxxxxx>]

walt wrote:
> Tomaž Borštnar wrote:
> [...]
> > > Or should I go with FreeBSD?
>
> > It all depends on which one do you know how to administer. Both will work.
>
> Heh.  I'm an amateur so I'm incompetent on both systems ;o)
>
> Seriously, is there much difference from a professional sysadmin's
> perspective?  Can you give some examples, perhaps, of where the
> admin would notice a big difference between DragonFly and FreeBSD?
>
> Thanks.

The only thing I worry about is how SA are handled, till so far DF has 
done this very well. So assuming that the functionality you require for 
your services is indeed available on your favorite OS and you have 
included system maintenance of that OS in your security procedures, the 
only thing that holds you back is corporate policies and cost/value 
balance in comparison to other systems.

For me it was easier to maintain my production servers on FreeBSD 
because I already had that and it's easier for me to have an homogeneous 
approach to my network, I have one dedicated server doing port and 
system builds so the binaries can be dropped in my test environment (1 
or 2 virtual servers, depending on the test) and if Ok onto the 
production machines.

The funny thing is that I tend to favor DF for my personal projects, 
except for my notebook, which dualboots XP and FBSD6 (I require WAP for 
my WiFi). Somehow DF feels more stable but that could be imaginary 
because FreeBSD hasn't gave me much trouble either.

In short if somebody is willing to setup a maintenance system and 
procedures for a certain OS and all required application run on that OS, 
then there is no technical reason why this shouldn't be DragonFlyBSD.

Of course migrating to another platform requires extensive testing of 
all required applications, which could hold you back because it's more 
effort then it's worth, but if you have to migrate anyway (i.e. FreeBSD 
4 to 6) then you could consider other platforms too.

Personally my production network ( 7 FreeBSD servers, 6 virtual on MS 
VirtualServer and 1 on the machine direct which is a jail host server) 
and test network (3 FreeBBSD's, 1 DragonFlyBSD all on VMWare <Debian 
Linux>) will not migrate very soon to DF, I tried to migrate my mail 
server but DF didn't run very well under the MS Virtual Server, it also 
was about the same time the migration to pkgsrc was done so I passed 
that round.

However Matt's plan to incorporate ZFS will be a major point to 
reconsider my networks architecture, thats why I keep a close eye on 
this project, too bad I always need some MS Servers for most of my user 
applications. But I think over time (when AMD releases their 
virtualization solution) I will have a couple of NetBSD/xen servers 
doing my windows servers and the rest on DF.

Time will tell.

--
mph