Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 16:33:37 -0800 (PST) From: Roger Marquis <marquis@roble.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD in good standing in netcraft survey Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0011031633001.61476-100000@roble.com>
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Greg Black <gjb@gbch.net> wrote: >I certainly am not impressed by uptimes over about 100 days. >They show that the site does not care about keeping current. In theory perhaps, not in reality. What uptime does tend to indicate is a well managed system. "Keeping current" is only really important to developers. To your average system administrator the less time spent "keeping current" the better. If you ever have to maintain a lights-out datacenter perhaps you'll see why. One nice thing about Sun's Solaris is its patch/package subsystem. It makes incremental upgrades very easy to apply. Sun also supports OS revisions going back several years. This is the right way to keep current, not by reinstalling or cvsupping and the relatively _large_risk_ of downtime and/or software incompatibilities. We average two years between Solaris OS upgrades. FreeBSD doesn't come close to that. Solaris' reliable method of incremental patching saves hours of planning, downtime and dollars over an equivalent FreeBSD site. This is one of the reasons why you don't see Sun's market share slipping in production environments. FreeBSD is, to an unfortunate degree, designed by and for developers with far too little input and direction from the people who manage production environments. This is one of the things that makes FreeBSD a great development platform and one of the reasons it remains cutting-edge. This is all great if you're a developer, as 99% of the crowd at the recent BSDcon seemed to be, but it's not necessarily so great when you're an admin. It seems unlikely we'll ever see FreeBSD's hard working developer community spending a lot of time on things like backwards compatibility, interoperability, and ease of management. This is too bad because these issues handicap FreeBSD vis-a-vis the Microsoft's and Sun's out there. I think it's a bad long term strategy but only time will tell for sure. -- Roger Marquis Roble Systems Consulting http://www.roble.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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