why an old operating system

[Bill Moran]

In response to prad <prad at towardsfreedom.com>:

> in our search for servers we contacted genstor (on the freebsd
> compatible hardware list) and a very nice fellow talked to us and sent
> us a quote. it was out of our price range, but i was very puzzled to see
> that the brand new and powerful system they were putting together was
> going to be operating with freebsd 5.4
> 
> why would a new system such as this be supplied with such an old os?

It's possible that they have not yet vetted their hardware against the
new OS.  i.e. it's a quality control thing.

At work, we get our hardware from Dell, which doesn't support FreeBSD
so we have to do our compatibility assurance in-house.  It's a lot of
work.  We're in the process of moving systems from 6.2 to 6.3 at this
time, but we only just got the oldest of our servers off the 5.X branch
a month ago.  I don't expect we'll be moving to 7.X until early 2009,
based on how long it takes us to assure it works in all the ways we
need it to (although a few non-critical systems, like my workstation,
are already running 7.X)

Can't speak for the vendor you mention, but that would be my guess.

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com