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Date:      Sat, 1 May 2010 04:19:13 +0200
From:      Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>
To:        Gary Kline <kline@thought.org>
Cc:        FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: ziz a dumb question?
Message-ID:  <20100501041913.81a34394.freebsd@edvax.de>
In-Reply-To: <20100501015705.GA46858@thought.org>
References:  <20100501015705.GA46858@thought.org>

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On Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:57:08 -0700, Gary Kline <kline@thought.org> wrote:
> i've never been anything near the extreme-green movement.  i
> figured that newer computers/cpus/etc would be more efficient
> than what came before. 

Oh, you mean that a "modern" desktop PC consumes as much power
as my old AS/400e with 10 hard disk drives - as loud a a common
PC, 2 times as big and 4 times as heavy? :-)



> right now, everybody is
> racing for efficiency.  not here yet.

I would say "racing for efficiency" will start if people do
recognize that in many settings, networked terminals are a
much better solution than one full-featured "modern" PC per
desk. At the moment, industry is just trying to sell "energy
efficiency" to those who are interested in it, but they get
the same crap as anybody else, but more expensive. :-)



> what i'm
> wondering is:: how good is this "PC-BSD" at being a server?  i
> mean, if it's good at being a toy [to listen to A/V STreams and
> other less-nerdy things], it probably can't be that solid on
> handling DNS ... at least not as well as FreeBSD. 

Basically, it's still FreeBSD "under the hood", so you can
run the basic services. Of course, you will have to install
them in either of the "non-supported" ways (i. e. PBI packages
usually won't be available for server-centered applications),
via pkg_add or by ports.

Because GUI operations vs. DNS workload won't be an issue
in terms of resource consumption, you probably will be lucky.
Serving web pages and maybe streams, and other "server stuff"
will be possible, too. PC-BSD performs acceptably even under
load.



> If anybody
> onlist has messed around with PC-BSD for *server* stuff, i'd be
> very interested in hearing about it.

In any case, check ports and firewall. PC-BSD intends to make
the experience to the user as comfortable as possible. This,
sadly, means to abandon well intended means of security. So
there may (!) be something that makes your machine interesting
for attackers - allthough you don't participate in 99.998% of
market share. :-)

I've tested PC-BSD on some occiassions, but I never really
used it for anything that would allow me to call it a server,
so I can't be more specific.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...



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