New Project Questions

[Roland Smith]

On Sun, Sep 07, 2014 at 10:59:19PM -0600, Dave Babb wrote:
> Good Evening,
> 
> While I have no questions a this moment. I will be having questions in
> the near future (days).
> 
> I am a retired systems integrator who has changed all of my
> specifications and basis of designs to FreeBSD from Linux....While
> retired, I have maintained two accounts that still want me to service
> them...The City of Simla came to me as a recommendation from one of my
> other clients. Based upon my own experience with FreeBSD over the last
> 6ish months, and frustration and embarrassment--in front of a
> client....with Linux. Plus the frustration with the systemd, Wayland,
> Mir, X debacle has caused my other clients to plan for FreeBSD
> conversions by Jan 2015. I am tired of deploying systems who may change
> to some new technology tomorrow, without proper thought, and potentially
> orphaning/breaking my project, or causing me to have to rebuilt it to
> accommodate the updates.....all on my nickle with no recoup of revenue.
> 
> My FreeBSD experience has been one of reliability, stability, and
> consistency. That's the experience I want to provide to this new client,
> and then to my old clients at years end. Frankly, I couldn't be happier
> with FreeBSD.

Pretty much. As a FreeBSD user since 5.3 I've used releases, and followed
STABLE if it provided new features I needed. The few cases where I've run into
problems have usually been hardware problems.

But there are some things that one needs to be aware of, e.g. and in no
particular order:

  * UFS snapshots (dump(8)-ing a live filesystem) doesn't work with journaled
    soft-updates.
  * GELI(8) doesn't support TRIM yet, so encrypting an SSD might slow it down
    a lot over time.
  * After an update to a new major FreeBSD version, it is usually a good idea
    to remove all ports and re-install them rather than update them in-place.

It is my *impression* that ZFS has its own peculiarities, but since I haven't
used it yet I cannot comment om them.

Subscribe to the freebsd-announce mailing list to keep on top of
announcements. Read /usr/src/UPDATING after updates.

When updating ports, read /usr/ports/UPDATING after updating the ports tree
but before starting portmaster!

> As I have rolled out a lot of Linux solutions over the years...the
> current project I have been awarded (City of Simla, Colorado IT
> Infrastructure Changeout) will be first big project I have done going
> pure FreeBSD on the server and on the desktop, instead of my old
> paradigm of Linux.

My workstation and laptop both run FreeBSD, and I'm very happy with them. But
especially with graphics hardware you have to be selective in what you buy.
The FreeBSD drivers are generally ports of the Linux drivers, and there are a
limited number of people working on them. So it takes a while for the latest
and greatest to become supported.

Having said that, the new KMS drivers for Radeons and Intel work fine.

> Because I still have Linux knowledge in my head...and being older...I
> fear inadvertently "linuxizing" FreeBSD.

I've made the same switch years ago. A big help is that the manual pages are
generally well done.

> I don't know if there are email length limitations, frequency limits, or
> what the culture is on this mailing list.

In my opinion, two of FreeBSD's best features are the *the community* and *the
ports tree*.

<snip>
> I would expect at some time to generate a chart, be that a DIA chart, or
> some other charting software (feel free to recommend one), for drawing
> up the new network architecture based upon my walk-through tomorrow.

Does it need to be an interactive tool? Otherwise you might consider;

* asymptote (examples: http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/gallery/)
* TikZ (LaTeX package, examples: http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/tag/diagrams/)
* metapost (examples: http://tex.loria.fr/prod-graph/zoonekynd/metapost/metapost.html)

Fair warning, these tools are more or less programming languages for
generating pictures. Very powerful but with a significant learning curve.

> More Q's: Are attachments allowed or not? PDF? or Native format?

Attachments are generally not allowed. But e.g. OpenPGP signatures are.

> Would someone in this mailing list please let me know what the culture
> is and proper usage of this list is, and what is expected of me when I
> generate an email to this list?

Try the Handbook, manual pages and Google first, before firing off a question
to the list. :-)

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://rsmith.home.xs4all.nl/
[plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated]
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