Date: 30 Aug 1999 10:43:14 -0400 From: Chris Shenton <cshenton@uucom.com> To: "Abdullah Bin Hamad." <arabian@nac.net> Cc: <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, <FreeBSD-ISP@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs SunOS/Solaris Message-ID: <lfd7w5gwhp.fsf@Samizdat.uucom.com> In-Reply-To: "Abdullah Bin Hamad."'s message of "Sun, 29 Aug 1999 04:48:53 %2B0300" References: <99082820345500.02576@bopbsd.trison.edu> <37C88EA1.3E236777@gorean.org> <008601bef1c0$bc1721c0$191e0285@net.qa.qatar.net.qa>
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On Sun, 29 Aug 1999 04:48:53 +0300, "Abdullah Bin Hamad." <arabian@nac.net> said: Abdullah> Hello folks, Why someone would choose FreeDSD for his ISP Abdullah> instead of SunOS/Solaris ? Abdullah> An ISP has 14k Dialup users. Abdullah> What could FreeBSD provide to an ISP more than SunOS/Solairs Abdullah> ? Abdullah> Should the ISP run the mail server on differnet machine, and Abdullah> named on saprate machine ..etc? Abdullah> Could someone who was using SunOS/Solaris give me more Abdullah> details. I help run one, but more like 2K dialup users instead of 14K (at this time). We use FreeBSD because of its cost, additional hardware is cheap and easy to find in case of emergency, and because it's stable and fast. I particularly like the fact that if I want to use some software package (e.g., Apache+mod_ssl, Cistron RADIUS, MRTG, ...) it's trivial to build from the ports collection. I help run another smallish ISP and use Sun there because it was donated hardware. Much harder and more expensive to upgrade the hardware, Solaris isn't *nearly* as fast, and it's harder to get OS bugs fixed. Building packages isn't as trivial as on FreeBSD. I'd go FreeBSD at this ISP if I had my way. At the first ISP we run mail, web, and RADIUS on a different machines -- the last for security, and the former for scalability. It would be easier to combine them (don't have to keep passwords in sync) but harder to grow the operation I think. What I'd like eventually to do is get all the passwords for RADIUS, FTP, POP out of the /etc/passwd file and into an application level database so there'd be no chance of system-level login for the customers and copying this authentication database wouldn't be so sensitive. I know it's doable now, just would take a lot of time I don't have right now. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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