FreeBSD Version recommend for OLD machine

[Steve Bertrand]

On 2010.03.11 23:29, Jorge Biquez wrote:
> Hello all.
> 
> I have an old machine that has been running 4.11-Stable for some years.
> This week something weird happened when I tried to update to latest
> version on 4.x. Anyway, I thought that was a good idea to update to 5.x
> and after doing all the process finally I can not have it running
> corrcetly. Not a big problem since a secondary  DNS an an email server
> for one domain. I am still trying to recover it downloading and
> installing the sae version it has but in case I can not fix I would like
> to install a mor erecent version.
> 
> The machine has a Motherboard that supports 2 double pentium III
> processors with 1GB of ram and a hard disk with 40GB.
> 
> It won't do anything else but a dns slave for maybe 100 domains, mail
> and squirrel for 10 domain, not more than 100 users with very low
> volume. That's all.
> 
> Can you give me your opinions on what would you?

Honestly, so long as there is no GUI running, the only real difference I
currently observe on machines that have the requirement to stay at this:

%uname -a

FreeBSD x.x.x 4.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE #0: Sat Apr 21 10:54:49
GMT 2001     jkh at narf.osd.bsdi.com:/usr/src/sys/compile/GENERIC  i386

...and something more current is that the more recent versions require
much more thought put into the original size of the root (/) partition,
particularly when you are used to performing source upgrades.

Earlier versions required *much* less space.

The performance difference is negligible, so long as though you plan on
running the same processes, and still perform proper diligence in
trimming your kernel config file appropriately.

With upgrading to a more recent version, you garner the benefits of
security patches, code efficiencies, ability to follow current
standards/practices etc.

Again... so long as the system won't change its overall process
objectives, go to the recent production release, but instead of
assigning 256M for /, throw 2G at it to be safe.

Steve