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Date:      Thu, 08 Apr 1999 08:02:21 -0600
From:      Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>
To:        Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Data Communications Magazine article
Message-ID:  <370CB6ED.502E25EF@softweyr.com>
References:  <370C3132.29B9E0F2@softweyr.com> <19990408151256.L2142@lemis.com> <370C3A60.5D005F12@softweyr.com> <19990408162920.P2142@lemis.com> <370CAB30.2FA7EC05@softweyr.com>

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Mr. Lee Bruno, 
Data Communications Magazine

Re: your April 7, 1999 article "Open-Source Software: Power to the People"

Mr. Bruno,

I read the referenced article with great interest and care.  I am
pleased to see such even and fair coverage of Open Source software,
and am particularly pleased to see your mention of BSD systems, often
overlooked by your colleagues in the popular computing press.

It is often difficult to research articles such as this.  In this
article I will identify some developments your readers may need in
order to make informed decisions about what BSD systems may do for
them.

Paid professional support is available for the FreeBSD operating
system from FreeBSD Mall; details are available at
http://www.freebsdmall.com/.  Each of the Open Source BSD operating
system groups also offers lists of consultants familiar with BSD
systems; many of these can provide professional support on an
individual basis as well.  All are supported through the usual mail
and web resources as mentioned in your article.

Clustering is most certainly in the cards for FreeBSD as well.
Several projects are working on various forms of clustering, and have
stable reliable systems based on clustering technology.  Simple server
load balancing, a weak form of clustering, is available from the
Eddieware project at http://www.eddieware.org/.  The David Sarnoff
Research Center has created a loosely coupled cluster of FreeBSD
machines for parallel computational work; see
ftp://ftp.sarnoff.com/pub/mnfs/www/docs/cluster.html for more
information about their parallel computing cluster.

Both Linux and BSD systems support standard, open-source LDAP servers.
Linux and FreeBSD also support PAM--Pluggable Authentication
Modules--to enable user authentication via LDP servers.  While
interoperability with NDS and AD is not guaranteed, it is certainly a
goal of the developers of the LDAP PAM modules.

Linux does have a 2 GByte filesystem, ext2fs, but this limitation does
not hamper BSD systems; the ufs filesystem in 4.4BSD has supported
large filesystem sizes--up to Exabyte capacity--for many years.

Recent BSD systems have added softupdate support, which allows
asynchronous updates of filesystem data in a much more resilient
manner than the Linux ext2fs approach. This technology is present in
FreeBSD 3.1, and will be in the upcoming OpenBSD 2.5 release. Also
added to FreeBSD 3.1 is the Vinum Volume Manager, which allows
administrators to add space from new disk drives to existing
filesystems, and to replicate data across multiple physical disks for
data security.  These additions make BSD systems, and particularly
FreeBSD, the best open source systems for supporting large disk
systems.

For more information about Vinum see http://www.lemis.com/vinum.html.
Information on FreeBSD is available at http://www.freebsd.org, NetBSD 
at http://www.netbsd.org and OpenBSD at http://www.openbsd.org.


-- 
       "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"

Wes Peters                                                 Softweyr LLC
http://www.softweyr.com/~softweyr                      wes@softweyr.com


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