Greg Lehey wrote:
> > I know it goes through periods of instability, but assuming that I'm
> > following the lists and know when not to build, could I put a 4.x
> > box up and not be embarrassed?
>
> Yes, but that's a big assumption: "assuming everything went OK". How
> do you known in advance whether you're not going to find a bug which
> eats its way, termitelike, through your file systems, and one day you
> look at the machine and it just falls into a heap of dust on the
> floor.
*Chuckle* Great visual. Of course, "odd" surprises are not completely
unexpected in any freebsd branch, and of course I do plan to take
appropriate measures to protect our customer's stuff. The system I'm
planning to design will require read-only access from the CGI box to the
rest of the world, and almost everything on the box itself will be
redundant data anyway. This will be true regardless of what platform we
use, so I think this is a unique opportunity to test -current in a
relatively pain-free, high load environment. At the same time, I would
prefer that it's not crashing regularly because it's my potatoes in the
sling, so to speak if I convince them to use freebsd.
> > 4. How about other "new" features, like soft updates and vinum?
>
> Vinum is available in -STABLE as well. It's the same code. I thought
> that soft updates were also pretty stable.
Ok, thanks for the info on vinum. If I'm going to make this work I need
to show disk access as good or better than linux, so I'm looking for
every edge.
> What I'm hearing here is that you want to go to -CURRENT because of
> NFS.
Yes, exactly. The other factors you mentioned aren't significant to me,
I'm quite familiar with traditional freebsd development cycle
instability. :) INRE Jordan's comments about moving the -current NFS
improvements to -stable, obviously I'd rather run -stable in a
production environment, so assuming we can get a patchset together I
could do some testing of that at home since I have two boxes now. My
understanding from what I've read was that the changes depended on some
architectural improvements in -current that couldn't (easily) be ported
back, but I'm still way behind on mail, so I am probably not all up to
date on that. However I can't emphasize strongly enough how much our
system depends on NFS. Whether that's a good thing or not isn't for me
to decide, I just work there. :) I must say though, working in an
all-Sun environment it's easy to get used to how easy NFS makes things.
I'm starting to feel the same way about samba since I set it up on my
home network.
Thanks very much to everyone for the responses, they were very helpful.
If anyone else has comments or suggestions I welcome them of course.
Doug
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