From owner-freebsd-www Sat Nov 1 05:32:57 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id FAA19020 for www-outgoing; Sat, 1 Nov 1997 05:32:57 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-www) Received: from fallout.campusview.indiana.edu (fallout.campusview.indiana.edu [149.159.1.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id FAA19013 for ; Sat, 1 Nov 1997 05:32:54 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jfieber@indiana.edu) Received: from localhost (jfieber@localhost) by fallout.campusview.indiana.edu (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id IAA04225; Sat, 1 Nov 1997 08:32:48 -0500 (EST) Date: Sat, 1 Nov 1997 08:32:47 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber To: Haden Cruickshank cc: www@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Is it for me? In-Reply-To: <01bce6b8$635643a0$892770c2@haden> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-www@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Sat, 1 Nov 1997, Haden Cruickshank wrote: > I have a web site at: http://www.2infinity.org , and I have full e-mail > services, and I was wondering whether FreeBSD was for me. It depends on your traffic volume. If you get hundreds of thousands of hits a day, FreeBSD will definately prove itself faster and more reliable. Running months at a time without having to reboot is a strength of FreeBSD. Some FreeBSD systems have been known to run well over a year without needing a reboot. On the other hand, if you only get a few thousand hits and 100% availability isn't important, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference. FreeBSD will probably be more secure. Microsoft is really quite new to TCP/IP and Internet applications and their software is still pretty easy to break from the outside. It is *essential* that you closely track bug fixes. There are security bugs in any operating system, including FreeBSD, but rarely are they so large and easy to take advantage of as are the bugs in the Windows95/NT. > If I just want to > try it, is it easy to uninstall from Win95? Will I still be able to use > Win95 applications once I have installed FreeBSD? You cannot run FreeBSD and Windows95 at the same time, although they can both live on the same hard drive. To share the hard drive, each operating system needs its own partition so if your hard drive isn't already partitioned, it could be a bit of a hassle. There is a program called FIPS that will repartition a disk without requiring a backup and restore, but I've never used it and would strongly recommend a backup before using it anyway. I hope this helps! -john