From owner-freebsd-current Thu May 6 8:36:46 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from dt057n14.san.rr.com (dt051nc7.san.rr.com [204.210.32.199]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 809611512C for ; Thu, 6 May 1999 08:36:42 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from Studded@gorean.org) Received: from gorean.org (master [10.0.0.2]) by dt057n14.san.rr.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id IAA02986; Thu, 6 May 1999 08:36:25 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from Studded@gorean.org) Message-ID: <3731B6F8.19C2074B@gorean.org> Date: Thu, 06 May 1999 08:36:24 -0700 From: Studded Organization: Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Greg Lehey Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How stable is -current? References: <37313DC9.FCAE4D71@gorean.org> <19990506163903.J40359@freebie.lemis.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Greg Lehey wrote: > > I know it goes through periods of instability, but assuming that I'm > > following the lists and know when not to build, could I put a 4.x > > box up and not be embarrassed? > > Yes, but that's a big assumption: "assuming everything went OK". How > do you known in advance whether you're not going to find a bug which > eats its way, termitelike, through your file systems, and one day you > look at the machine and it just falls into a heap of dust on the > floor. *Chuckle* Great visual. Of course, "odd" surprises are not completely unexpected in any freebsd branch, and of course I do plan to take appropriate measures to protect our customer's stuff. The system I'm planning to design will require read-only access from the CGI box to the rest of the world, and almost everything on the box itself will be redundant data anyway. This will be true regardless of what platform we use, so I think this is a unique opportunity to test -current in a relatively pain-free, high load environment. At the same time, I would prefer that it's not crashing regularly because it's my potatoes in the sling, so to speak if I convince them to use freebsd. > > 4. How about other "new" features, like soft updates and vinum? > > Vinum is available in -STABLE as well. It's the same code. I thought > that soft updates were also pretty stable. Ok, thanks for the info on vinum. If I'm going to make this work I need to show disk access as good or better than linux, so I'm looking for every edge. > What I'm hearing here is that you want to go to -CURRENT because of > NFS. Yes, exactly. The other factors you mentioned aren't significant to me, I'm quite familiar with traditional freebsd development cycle instability. :) INRE Jordan's comments about moving the -current NFS improvements to -stable, obviously I'd rather run -stable in a production environment, so assuming we can get a patchset together I could do some testing of that at home since I have two boxes now. My understanding from what I've read was that the changes depended on some architectural improvements in -current that couldn't (easily) be ported back, but I'm still way behind on mail, so I am probably not all up to date on that. However I can't emphasize strongly enough how much our system depends on NFS. Whether that's a good thing or not isn't for me to decide, I just work there. :) I must say though, working in an all-Sun environment it's easy to get used to how easy NFS makes things. I'm starting to feel the same way about samba since I set it up on my home network. Thanks very much to everyone for the responses, they were very helpful. If anyone else has comments or suggestions I welcome them of course. Doug -- *** Chief Operations Officer, DALnet IRC network *** Nominated for quote of the year is the statement made by Representative Dick Armey (Texas), who when asked if he were in the President's place, would he resign, responded: "If I were in the President's place I would not get a chance to resign. I would be lying in a pool of my own blood hearing Mrs. Armey standing over me saying, 'How do I reload this damn thing?'" To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message