29 Nov
2003
29 Nov
'03
5:27 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Jay West once stated:
The key here to me, is that you specified you are going to run "services",
and that you are concerned with reliability because "your friends server
isn't stable".
FreeBSD, or any of the XBsd's, are definitely the choice over linux there,
given those two statements. No, I'm not trying to start any wars - if
someone disagrees with me, please back it up - as I will here.
The BSDs are a bit more stable and require less of a footprint than Linux,
but if it's learning you are going for, there are more books about Linux
than the BSDs.
And depending upon the age of the equipment, you may not want the latest
version of Linux as the 2.4 series is quite a bit bigger (significantly)
than 2.0. Up until about six months ago I was running a production server
(about a dozen websites, plus email) on a 486 (33Mhz, 20MB RAM, 17G drive
space) with no problem (using RedHat 5.2 with Linux 2.0.39).
Why is this important you may ask? Well, because you
want to run server
based services like mail and web serving. Couple that with the fact you are
using (comparatively, no denigration intended) a low powered machine to do
it. If the thing is swapping when it shouldn't, you've just cut the nu*s off
the machine and any hopes for acceptable performance.
I never had that much of a problem with Linux 2.0 with 20M of RAM serving
up websites and email. It didn't swap much and it was only when my friend
wanted to do more than just simple webserving that we switched to a more
modern machine.
-spc (But I've heard good things about the BSDs ... )