Re: Serious question: Is DragonFly's smp ISP-production-ready?
On 4/19/06, Tomaž Borštnar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...] I'm sorry for chiming in here, but I feel I should say this: - I like DFly's SMP approach better - various pieces of hardware work a bit better (read: they work) under FreeBSD due to more active development and newer commits. These are small issues such as WPA (which is about to be fixed these days) for wireless, better DMA handling for various IDE chipsets (I'm sure that these would also be easy to fix with small commits in various .h files). - threading is still an open subject. I asked a question about this on the mailing list a few days ago and David Xu said he was working on it. I have a few things that would benefit from threading which forces me to stick to FreeBSD for the time being (with libthr, by the way :) - I like the idea of using pkgsrc better, because it targets a much broader user base, so issues are more promptly brought to commiters' attention and dealt with. - I like Matt's reactions better (no, this is not asskissing, just an impression) - he seems to care more for his public's reactions and is more willing to listen to new ideas. This doesn't affect the projects' leadership at all, it seems, which is great. I know I didn't make much sense, but bottom line, DFly is certainly the platform of choice for me, once it has combed a few minor things. I'm one of the anxious users out there :) I'd love to spend more time hacking on it and submitting patches, but unfortunately my customers pay for other things :( -- If it's there, and you can see it, it's real. If it's not there, and you can see it, it's virtual. If it's there, and you can't see it, it's transparent. If it's not there, and you can't see it, you erased it.
Re: Serious question: Is DragonFly's smp ISP-production-ready?
Tomaž Borštnar wrote: > >> a jail host server) and test network (3 FreeBBSD's, 1 DragonFlyBSD all on VMWare > no problems with timekeeping in DF? I still need to have rdate in cron in order to fix time slips with 1.4.3 under Vmware Server. Yes I do but that are test servers so I don't care if their a bit offsync. -- mph
Re: Serious question: Is DragonFly's smp ISP-production-ready?
On Wed, 19 Apr 2006, [UTF-8] Tomaž Borštnar wrote: > The only other thing why I would go with FreeBSD instead of DF is lack of > diversity in pkgsrc compared to ports, but even that is changing towards > pkgsrc - still catching diversity in ports though. If there are any packages you are needing, please ask pkgsrc-users list about it. Maybe someone has it already or someone wil help create it for you. Jeremy C. Reed echo ':6DB6=88>?;@69876tA=AC8BB5tA6487><' | tr '4-F' 'wu rofIn.lkigemca'
Re: Serious question: Is DragonFly's smp ISP-production-ready?
Martin P. Hellwig pravi: walt wrote: Tomaž Borštnar wrote: [...] Or should I go with FreeBSD? It all depends on which one do you know how to administer. Both will work. Heh. I'm an amateur so I'm incompetent on both systems ;o) Seriously, is there much difference from a professional sysadmin's perspective? Can you give some examples, perhaps, of where the admin would notice a big difference between DragonFly and FreeBSD? One excellent value for DF over FreeBSD is that properly reported bugs gets attention and gets fixed much faster. This has already helped me in the past - had occasional bugs and after one of them I (physically) went to server to try to provide more info for Matt and 2 hours later bug was found and fixed. It was in cvs even before I got mail from Matt and it was all very fast! The only other thing why I would go with FreeBSD instead of DF is lack of diversity in pkgsrc compared to ports, but even that is changing towards pkgsrc - still catching diversity in ports though. Also for new file server DF seems excellent choice, because developers are very concerned that it works great and use it for themselves. And this is even without cluster plans! Of course migrating to another platform requires extensive testing of all required applications, which could hold you back because it's more effort then it's worth, but if you have to migrate anyway (i.e. FreeBSD 4 to 6) then you could consider other platforms too. Exactly! Personally my production network ( 7 FreeBSD servers, 6 virtual on MS VirtualServer and 1 on the machine direct which is a jail host server) and test network (3 FreeBBSD's, 1 DragonFlyBSD all on VMWare no problems with timekeeping in DF? I still need to have rdate in cron in order to fix time slips with 1.4.3 under Vmware Server. p.s. I do not have bad experiences from FreeBSD project responsiveness generally, but you can always read ramblings from people who feel that somebody should help them fix problems faster. I know that FreeBSD is bigger project and with a lot of people you often have problem with scheduling them :)
Re: Serious question: Is DragonFly's smp ISP-production-ready?
walt wrote: Tomaž Borštnar wrote: [...] Or should I go with FreeBSD? It all depends on which one do you know how to administer. Both will work. Heh. I'm an amateur so I'm incompetent on both systems ;o) Seriously, is there much difference from a professional sysadmin's perspective? Can you give some examples, perhaps, of where the admin would notice a big difference between DragonFly and FreeBSD? Thanks. The only thing I worry about is how SA are handled, till so far DF has done this very well. So assuming that the functionality you require for your services is indeed available on your favorite OS and you have included system maintenance of that OS in your security procedures, the only thing that holds you back is corporate policies and cost/value balance in comparison to other systems. For me it was easier to maintain my production servers on FreeBSD because I already had that and it's easier for me to have an homogeneous approach to my network, I have one dedicated server doing port and system builds so the binaries can be dropped in my test environment (1 or 2 virtual servers, depending on the test) and if Ok onto the production machines. The funny thing is that I tend to favor DF for my personal projects, except for my notebook, which dualboots XP and FBSD6 (I require WAP for my WiFi). Somehow DF feels more stable but that could be imaginary because FreeBSD hasn't gave me much trouble either. In short if somebody is willing to setup a maintenance system and procedures for a certain OS and all required application run on that OS, then there is no technical reason why this shouldn't be DragonFlyBSD. Of course migrating to another platform requires extensive testing of all required applications, which could hold you back because it's more effort then it's worth, but if you have to migrate anyway (i.e. FreeBSD 4 to 6) then you could consider other platforms too. Personally my production network ( 7 FreeBSD servers, 6 virtual on MS VirtualServer and 1 on the machine direct which is a jail host server) and test network (3 FreeBBSD's, 1 DragonFlyBSD all on VMWare Linux>) will not migrate very soon to DF, I tried to migrate my mail server but DF didn't run very well under the MS Virtual Server, it also was about the same time the migration to pkgsrc was done so I passed that round. However Matt's plan to incorporate ZFS will be a major point to reconsider my networks architecture, thats why I keep a close eye on this project, too bad I always need some MS Servers for most of my user applications. But I think over time (when AMD releases their virtualization solution) I will have a couple of NetBSD/xen servers doing my windows servers and the rest on DF. Time will tell. -- mph
Re: Serious question: Is DragonFly's smp ISP-production-ready?
Tomaž Borštnar wrote: [...] >> Or should I go with FreeBSD? > It all depends on which one do you know how to administer. Both will work. Heh. I'm an amateur so I'm incompetent on both systems ;o) Seriously, is there much difference from a professional sysadmin's perspective? Can you give some examples, perhaps, of where the admin would notice a big difference between DragonFly and FreeBSD? Thanks.
Re: Serious question: Is DragonFly's smp ISP-production-ready?
Petr Janda pravi: We have a p3 2x1133mh (i think) box not used and i was thinking about setting it up as as a mailfilter gateway. The question is, is DragonFly's SMP production ready and the whole system suitable for mission critical applications? I'd like to hear what Matt and other devs and users think. 1.2.6 and later is rock stable. Stable for databases, mail server, web servers, etc. Or should I go with FreeBSD? It all depends on which one do you know how to administer. Both will work. Tomaž
Re: Serious question: Is DragonFly's smp ISP-production-ready?
On 4/18/06, Petr Janda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > We have a p3 2x1133mh (i think) box not used and i was thinking about setting > it up as as a mailfilter gateway. The question is, is DragonFly's SMP > production ready and the whole system suitable for mission critical > applications? I'd like to hear what Matt and other devs and users think. > > Or should I go with FreeBSD? In my limited experience and watching mailing lists / bug reports (and running both systems in the past), DragonFly is miles ahead of FreeBSD in cleanliness and stability, but still has a non-zero amount of bugs (which is entirely reasonable for any system, especially considering the revolutionary development involved). I adhere to NetBSD which has pretty much never failed me - though its SMP is primitive, it's stable, and the system itself performs very well overall. It even includes Postfix in the base package :) High kernel parallelism is nice, but you probably won't notice on a mail filter gateway. I'd run NetBSD. It sometimes hurts on interactive sessions, even on my dual-core, where the kernel is working on a long blocking code path (e.g. sync'ing large buffers during a file copy) but I'm not even sure DragonFly's parallelism is at the stage where such things don't happen - last I heard almost all drivers are still giant-locked, including the ones with potentially high latency like disks (however, maybe preemption is still in place - it sure isn't in NetBSD). -- Dmitri Nikulin
