which FreeBSD?

[Chris Dillon]

This belongs in -questions, not -smp.

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, David Newman wrote:

> Greetings. For a small office (~10 users), I am planning to build a
> mail and DNS server using FreeBSD-SMP; details below. My
> requirements are availability and performance, in that order.
>
> Which FreeBSD is better suited for this -- 4.8 or 5.1?

4.8-RELEASE or 4.8-STABLE

> Hardware:
> Compaq Proliant 1850R 6/550 (2 x 550-MHz PIII), 1 Gbyte RAM, 2 x
> 18-Gbyte SCSI drives

1000% overkill for only 10 users.  As an example, I (still) have a
66MHz 486 with 48MB RAM and a single 2GB SCSI drive handling over 300
users with sendmail and cyrus-imapd.  Focus on reliability foremost,
so mirror those two SCSI drives you have.  The Proliant 1850R doesn't
offer the ability to use redundant memory, but it at least does ECC.
You'll also have an extra processor already there if one happens to go
south, and you would never notice it was gone.

> Software:
> postfix, courier-imap, bind

Consider cyrus-imapd2 or cyrus-imapd22 instead of courier-imap.  Very
reliable, very fast, and offers you the ability to create a "black
box" mail appliance that does not require the use of local user
accounts, if you wish to go that route.

-- 
 Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us
 FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet
 - Available for IA32, IA64, PC98, Alpha, and UltraSPARC architectures
 - x86-64, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, and S/390 under development
 - http://www.freebsd.org

No trees were harmed in the composition of this message, although some
electrons were mildly inconvenienced.