FreeBSD in Business (was Re: Idea for FreeBSD)

[Adrian Penisoara]

Hi,

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 4:52 PM, Stefan Lambrev
<stefan.lambrev at moneybookers.com> wrote:

>>  I'm not sure where is that remark headed to. And I don't think
>> (re)packaging a business-centric version would harm -- please correct
>> me if I'm wrong.
>>
>
> The problem with "enterprise" is that they ship their own kernel which is
> heavily modified.

Not one, but rather multiple kernels (which includes the generic one).
Which otherwise are possible to build with the vanilla distro, but it
might take a lot of tweaking time to get there and you got no QA for
that either.

> If you want enterprise go for OSX :) I think it's the best enterprise BSDish
> system ;)

Why not help the people already using FreeBSD at their workplace get
better arguments to keep and grow the FreeBSD base ? ;)

> Also there are more packages for FreeBSD available then for RH, and I can
> assure you that
> all programs that you actually use (like ssh, apache, perl and etc) you have
> to manually compile to fit your needs.

I tend to disagree in this particular context -- business usage relies
on stability which implies a small set of very well tested packages,
not necessarily the latest version.

>>
>>
>>>>
>>>>  While we're at it, I wish we could leverage the posibility for the
>>>> admin to manually start the service at the CLI, no matter whether the
>>>> service has been enabled or not -- that is the "<svc>_enable" keyword
>>>> should have effect only in the bootup/automatic contexts.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> Like keywords - forcestart forcerestart forcestop ?!?!
>>>
>>
>> Yes, I am always reminded of that :).
>> Well, to tell you the truth, I do not know of any other OS which
>> requires prefixing with "force" the start/stop actions in order to act
>> on the service at the command line, and personally I wish it weren't
>> the case.
>>
>
> Well I bet you can find this in most linux distros that copy FreeBSD. What
> about gentoo?

Umm, I have used Gentoo and I do not remember having to use
"forcestart" at the command line...

> Anyway I think that the beauty of the current rc/ng system in freebsd is
> that it's very easy to understand and use it.
> Not like those nasty XML config files that makes you blind.
> There are small fixes that can be applied to make the system even better,
> but rewriting it just for the sport looks like wasting too much power :)
> But after all FreeBSD innovate do not imitate ;)
>
> Anyway it's may be just me, but I do not think that the rc system in freebsd
> is the showstopper, that needs funding or more ppl looking at it.

Right. And I'm going to stop here -- if you want to continue we can go
off-the-list.

> And btw burdening the rc subsystem to monitor your daemons is overkill too.
> It will never work as good as real monitoring software,
> and will only bloat things. There are tons of utilities that can do this.

Umm, one should not need huge monitoring software packages to
accomplish such (simple?) tasks. The inittab/ttys systems comes to my
mind when I say this... ;).

Over & out,
Adrian.