Re: [Toolserver-l] operating systems and web servers

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Daniel Kinzler: Why Linux and not FreeBSD, or Solaris, or OpenServer, or MP-RAS, or ...? I've asked this many times in the past (usually when someone says "I want Linux") and never had a real answer that I can remember.[0] The way I see it, choice of operating system has very little impact on users because users don't, generally, interact with the operating system. There are a few specific cases which make a difference (I can think of cron, 'ps' and top/prstat), but apart from that, the software users actually use is the stuff in /opt/ts, which is independent of operating system.[1] For servers other than login servers (like databases) there are additional considerations, since those make a lot more use of OS features, like storage management. I've previously considered and rejected FreeBSD for use as a database server (in favour of staying with Solaris + VxVM). To me, FreeBSD seems to be an ideal candidate for a platform to layer /opt/ts on top of: it provides a base operating system which is reliable, has a good feature set in areas which only the OS can provide (e.g. DTrace, ZFS, auditing), and it's simple to install and maintain. - river. [0] I know some people are concerned about use of proprietary software on the Toolserver, but that's a separate issue, and in any case FreeBSD and Linux are equally open source. [1] This assumes that all the software we provide works on FreeBSD, of course. I haven't verified this, because we provide ~650 packages and it would take many hours, so there's no point doing it unless we actually decide to change OS. However, I don't foresee any problems.