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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.bhp.com.au!mel.dit.csiro.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.hawaii.edu!ames!hookup!news.kei.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.sprintlink.net!news1!not-for-mail From: root@dyson.iquest.net (John S. Dyson) Subject: Re: Which version of BSD for Internet Box? Why? X-Nntp-Posting-Host: dyson.iquest.net Message-ID: <4ee8j6$1ps@dyson.iquest.net> Sender: news@iquest.net (News Admin) Organization: John S. Dyson's home machine References: <4e35ee$i6m@news.mel.aone.net.au> <4e9mv9$oll@news.voicenet.com> Date: Sat, 27 Jan 1996 22:22:30 GMT Lines: 46 > >Which version of BSD for an Internet box > Firstly, I would suggest the following, in this order with the listed caveats (every one of the below is very good though). Good people are available to help with every one of these OSes: (Note that I am a FreeBSDer, so please recognize the possibility of bias, these are opinions.) On Intel: FreeBSD, if you need the highest performance, and great stability, but NFS could be better. Walnut Creek and the FreeBSD team does support it. FreeBSD will eventually fix the NFS problems, but if you need perfect NFS *right now* it is probably not your best choice. The NFS is ok for normal workstation usage however. But, otherwise is a stability and performance winner. BSDI, for more stable NFS, but slightly lower performance otherwise. More complete, commercial style support is available directly from the vendor. Check with other BSDI customers for support quality info. It's costing money is the biggest disadvantage. NetBSD, if you are also interested in an almost identical system running on other platforms. I would expect network perf would be similar to FreeBSD/BSDI, but VM and buffer cache performance should be slower than FreeBSD. NetBSD is a more "conservative" OS than FreeBSD (but this is NOT meant in a negatively prejudicial sense, but meant to be neutral.) It is probably reasonable to use NetBSD on non-Intel machines and FreeBSD on Intel machines -- the OSes are very much alike. OpenBSD, about the same as NetBSD -- a slightly different feature set. Good people are backing OpenBSD also, relatively new. On Non-Intel: NetBSD, OpenBSD... GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR DECISION!!! John Dyson dyson@freebsd.org