From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Apr 22 23:33:27 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from germanium.xtalwind.net (germanium.xtalwind.net [205.160.242.5]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 260FD1514B for ; Thu, 22 Apr 1999 23:33:20 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jack@germanium.xtalwind.net) Received: from localhost (jack@localhost) by germanium.xtalwind.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id CAA79922; Fri, 23 Apr 1999 02:30:44 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 02:30:44 -0400 (EDT) From: jack To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD and memetics In-Reply-To: <51207.924838293@zippy.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org For the foreseeable future nothing in the desktop market but that pseudo-OS from Redmond will be anything but a very small fish in a very big ocean. It is not fair, it is not logical, it is not `right', but that is the way it is. People just need to get over it. IMO, where FreeBSD can best expend its finite resources is in the area where it already excels, servers. An area where it can be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. We had a 2.2.6 box acting as a terminal server with 64 analog modems connected to it. It ran from last June, when lightning hit a pole down the street and the power company took a loooong lunch, until two weeks ago when we took it down to replace those modems with digital. Another box runs our user database, does account renewals, renewal notification, billing, RADIUS authentication and accounting, and a few other incidentals. That box ran from last July, when someone accidentally turned it off, until two weeks ago when it was updated from 2.2.6 to stable. (Scrappy if you're on this list, kudos to your group also, it's postgresql. We guesstimate about 750,000 transactions a day and the postmaster daemon ran the entire time.) Nearly every one of the few times a box has gone down in the past two plus years that we have run FreeBSD it has been either a hardware problem or pilot error. Perhaps [net|open]BSD would give us the same reliability, but I have no intention of abandoning what I know works to find out. I doubt BSDi would since our news server runs for months on FreeBSD but never ran for more than a few weeks on BSDi. From what I've seen of linux I have no reason to think it would perform as well. I know NT doesn't come anywhere near close to matching those uptimes. If someone needs/wants a particular bell or whistle for their desktop there is nothing stopping them from writing it themselves or hiring someone who can. FreeBSD needs to keep its resources directed toward remaining the quality, reliable, industrial strength OS that it is and not worry about quantity. Offering the greatest quality in a niche market is the best way to survive against Bill's $$$ and Linus' groupies. Rational advocacy of a solid platform is what is needed to increase the growth rate of the userbase. Rabid fanaticism doesn't work and is easily overlooked and upstaged. Just ask the poor SOB that went to all that trouble to blow up the World Trade Towers and then got bumped back to page five by OJ. :) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack O'Neill Systems Administrator / Systems Analyst jack@germanium.xtalwind.net Crystal Wind Communications, Inc. Finger jack@germanium.xtalwind.net for my PGP key. PGP Key fingerprint = F6 C4 E6 D4 2F 15 A7 67 FD 09 E9 3C 5F CC EB CD enriched, vcard, HTML messages > /dev/null -------------------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message