[Toolserver-l] operating systems and web servers

[Jeremy Baron]

(Take with some grains of salt: never used FreeBSD or Solaris shells myself
and am not a ts-admin. Also, this is a cell phone and I shouldn't even be
awake now!)

Also, what do you lose with FreeBSD?

so far I can think of:
* zfs dedupe
* there's no longer a single "goto" company to get support from
(guessing...) so you lose that annual cost but it may be non trivial to find
the right hacker to find/fix a problem in an emergency. of course much of
that support is likely to come for free (a guess)
* you're still a different platform from the rest of wikimedia (basically
the foundation) and so lose economy of scale
* you mentioned SGE would still be available but it may be unmaintained
(last I checked its enwp article, it said oracle was close sourcing it) just
to keep in mind, I wouldn't stay just for SGE

things you lose with linux vs. FreeBSD:
* zfs is gone and (assuming lvm2 + traditional RAID vs. zfs) generally thin
storage provisioning and snapshotting is much more limited and wasteful and
fragile/more room for error. also most storage expansions will end up w/
transition periods that have *no* redundancy.
* zones/jails

I haven't kept up with the status in the last ~8 months but debian-kfreebsd
may have matured enough to warrant a look. (See #debian-kbsd on oftc)

-Jeremy
On Jun 7, 2011 2:58 AM, "Daniel Kinzler" <daniel at brightbyte.de> wrote:
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