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From: dillon@best.com (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreebBSD 2.0.5-R crashes every 2 DAYS!!
Date: 23 Jul 1995 12:35:52 -0700
Organization: Best Internet Communications, Inc. (info@best.com)
Lines: 98
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <3uu8ao$4ts@blob.best.net>
References: <3urlmb$7co@ucsbuxb.ucsb.edu> <3us8mc$17j@agate.berkeley.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: blob.best.net
:In article <3us8mc$17j@agate.berkeley.edu>,
:Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh@violet.berkeley.edu> wrote:
:>In article <3urlmb$7co@ucsbuxb.ucsb.edu>,
:>Loren Koss <loren@beauty.ucsb.edu> wrote:
:>>to hit ^C, then it will hang after the sendmail. I have to usually
:>>reboot three times before it actually gets back to working.
:>
:>You have to reboot 3 times to get it working?? This spells one thing
:>to my mind: Hardware problems. It may have run DOS before, but that
:>doesn't prove much as we've already well established that FreeBSD
:>will make mincemeat of marginal hardware where DOS simply doesn't use
:>enough of the machine's capabilities to be worth mentioning (if you
:>don't believe me, take a look at the relative performance of DOS
:>and FreeBSD file I/O).
:>
:>>P.S. 2.0.5-R isn't very stable.. is it?
:>
:>Well, a number of people have reported excellent stability with it and
:>our incredibly busy ftp.cdrom.com machine runs it with very good
:>reliablity. This is not to say it's bugless, but stable? Sure, unless
:>you're beating the heck out of it in interesting ways like BEST seems
:>to be (and we're working very actively with them to fix each problem they
:>find) but they're a fairly rare case.
:>
:> Jordan
<GRIN>
We've seen our share of hardware problems. I have one suggestion:
never buy memory without parity. We had a bad 32MByte Simm
a few weeks ago which crashed the machine about once a day, and
if it were not for the parity NMI, we would never have known it
was the memory.
Other problems we've seen: disk drives going bad, of course, but
the most common one seems to be sticky ethernet cards. Sometimes one
of the ethernelink III's stops dead in its tracks, solved only by
ifconfig'ing it down and then up again. So far I have yet to find
a card that operates perfectly in the face of constant stress.
As far as OS bugs go: Well, all OS's have them. I have yet to
find an OS that cannot be crashed. When you drive a machine into
the ground, *ALL* OS's have a tendancy to show their worse aspects.
On the whole, I find commercial OS's such as IRIX and SunOS (to
name two in my direct experience) to be no more reliable then
FreeBSD. That isn't to say that OS's don't have their bad days,
but on the whole I would take statements such as "go with commercial
OS *BLAH* rather then this free crap" to be an indication that
the person making the statement has been brainwashed by the written
word rather then by any real experience.
I can tell you, frankly, that I get a whole lot better response from
the FreeBSD folks then I do with the BSDI or SGI folks. The BSDI
folks seem focused on giving me *exactly* the level of technical
support I pay for and most of the people I talk to anyway know less
then I do! The SGI folks dwell on their trade secrets so much (for
no good reason, I am not all that impressed by the IRIX core)
that it is impossible to have a conversation or even get to someone
who knows the answers to my questions without a lot of hassle. The
SUN folks have been focused on Solaris, which I wouldn't touch with
a ten foot pole, and until very recently pretty much ignored the much
more stable SunOS, plus the OS is full of security holes. I spent a
week trying to secure a SunOS machine once and a friend stepped in
and broke root in less then 10 seconds from an unprivilaged account.
Sigh. Also, unless you pay huge amounts of money, you are stuck with
releases and updates that are few and far between. In another
unrelated project about a year ago, I was forced to drop NextSTEP
as a viable OS because they never fixed the more serious OS bugs!
(But people should keep in mind that I am not asking dumb-user questions
of them either. An OS-illiterate could very well get better technical
support service from one of the commercial OS's)
So, that leaves FreeBSD. The source code is available and compileable,
the people responsible for the OS (which is everyone :-)) are amoung
the best K-Programmers in the world, and so on. The only fault.. the
only thing that possibly gives the commercial OS's an edge beyond their
brandname recognition, is that the commercial OS's have a more
formalized release system and maintain a tree for bug fixes to the
most recent release independant of any new work. The Linux and
FreeBSD folk tend to combine current-release bug fixes with new work,
so one must be careful when one merges in a FreeBSD-current tree
into one's production tree so as not to introduce new bugs when fixing
existing bugs.
Linux isn't bad, but it is so informal that it is extremely difficult
to merge in only bug fixes due to the large number of people experimenting
on the main tree. Ignoring performance aspects, I find I have to
discount Linux as a production OS on those grounds alone, but I still
think Linux is an excellent choice for a home machine. Taking
performance into account makes the situation even less tenable. While
I admire all the work that has gone into Linux, it is simply too
inefficient for a production system: Disk I/O and network performance
is abysmal and I could never load it down as heavily as I load down
our FreeBSD machines. But, again, for a home system, Linux is fine.
-Matt