[Lilux-help] FreeBSD, compile from source and Distributions

[Patrick Kaell]

Michael Scherer wrote:


> and there is commercial support, :
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/commercial/consulting.html

I like the *BSDs and I also think that they are technically superior to 
Linux. But the difference (unlike compared to Windows) between Linux and 
*BSD just is too small to justify giving up commercial support.

By commercial support I can give you an example:

At work we use HP DL380 servers from HP. HP provides Linux drivers and 
agents for everything (for RedHat's Enterprise distributions). You can 
control the temperature of different zones, rotating speed of the fans, 
RAID status. There is a curses based tool to configure the RAID. If 
there is a problem, it gets logged into syslogd and the agent sends SNMP 
traps.

Without the agents installed, I would *not* get noticed when a drive 
fails. I would not see a single line in syslogd. OK, there is a red 
light on the drive itself which goes on, but the servers aren't all 
located on our site!

The industry just has settled on Linux! They may support a second 
systems besides Windows (and it is justified because Linux is quite 
different to Windows and Linux does many things Windows cannot do), but 
they will not support a third system where the benefits are quite marginal.

Many organisations who replace commercial Unix by Linux need Oracle and 
DB2 support (emulation just doesn't cut it). They don't just do FTP, WWW 
and Mail especially on the large servers.

Don't forget, I have *BSD installed on many machines at home and as a 
firewall I run NetBSD on a Sun SparcClassic. But I would not recommend 
it at work, where people just have accepted Linux.

Patrick Kaell