The BSD Certification Group are running a new survey: the BSD Usage Survey. This survey aims to collect detailed statistics on how and where BSD systems are used around the world. The survey is short – only 19 questions – and should only take a few minutes to complete.
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I did the survey earlier, it is aimed at companies mainly.
We run more than 50 Windows servers, just one FreeBSD fax server, and guess of which one I forgot the admin password because I haven’t had to do anything with it for over a year (now two years or so).
And to think it runs in the office that seems to have bad karma with servers. (two complete re-installs so far because of utterly strange malfunctions in Windows)
So why don’t you replace your other Windows servers with FreeBSD?
Repetitive Management Injuries. Just the thought of Open Source or freeware freaks out the boss. If only it had a pricetag, maybe then he’d understand it.
Buy a copy for each system from BSD Mall (http://www.bsdmall.com/) to justify it with your boss.
Unless it’s as glamourous as MS licensing it won’t work on him. I’m glad he’ll retire soon because the new one seems much more open to “alternatives”.
Survey is back online. I just did the survey. Anyone who runs *bsd on their desktops/servers @ work should do the survey!
I use these on older hardware especially (NetBSD) so that I can develop solutions that are aimed at my workplace without havng to risk my production servers
LONG LIVE BSD!!!
should i take thixs survey if i think BSD is some type of sexual fetish?
uuuuhh….. no
PS: Seek treatment!!! A.S.A.P.
We use NetBSD for the Alpha systems since Tru64 is no longer an up to date option. NetBSD also serves as my work and home OS used on the latest Pentium based systems.
Using FreeBSD for some services.
In an office that has Sparc, Alpha, HP, and recently, x86 based servers, NetBSD is great for all systems. All systems can share the same devices, configuration and expected behavior.
Do you think your firm would be interested in a BSD version of the LPIC1 for junior admins if the BSD Cert Group brought one out?
Slashdot have this story as well.
Someone from BSDCertification.org has posted the running totals there.
http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=162629&cid=13595288
2200 results so far, 74% FreeBSD, 32% Open, 20% Net 3% DragonFly.
I wonder what percentage of those FreeBSD instalations are 5.x or higher. Just based on my own experience with it, I’m guessing that 4.x is still far more widely used.
Traditionally, FreeBSD has been my prefered OS, but 5.x has been a real PITA for me. Only recently have I been able to get 5.4 installed on my generic “play” box, and then only after swapping out (an admittedly less than stellar) PATA 200 gig hard drive for an older 40 gig one, as 5.4 couldn’t do anything with it. Further more, my generic Logitech USB mouse simply would not work under 5.4, despite having set up both X and moused properly. Mystifying. It’s not uncommon or especially crappy harware.
I certainly hope that simple things like this get ironed out, and I’m sure that they will in time, but for right now, I at least have little use for it, and couldn’t recommend it for serious work. It’s a shame too, as it’s the only BSD right now that can compete nearly feature for feature with Linux, and has (from most of the benchmarks I’ve seen) equivelant performace to boot.
Before 5.x came along, I found it to be a wonderful system. I look forward to it being so again. Perhaps with 6.x…
“the only BSD right now that can compete nearly feature for feature with Linux, and has (from most of the benchmarks I’ve seen) equivelant performace to boot”
That same slashdot thread above included a little “DragonFly is better than FreeBSD” spat that referenced a 2003 comparison you might find of interest.
http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/
That suggests you might also find NetBSD an acceptable Linux alternative. (Gentoo uses NetBSD’s ports system).
I’ve both seen that site, and run the software (back when it was buildable by mere mortals), and NetBSD’s swift fixes and associated performance gains were astonishing.
However, NetBSD currently uses a single kernel lock for SMP hardware, whereas FreeBSD now has fine grained locking, which allow it to make much better use of such hardware.
And let’s not forget the thing that I said in my original post regarding the fact that of the existing BSDs, FreeBSD is the only one (yes, the only one) that can compete feature for feature with Linux, as well as having similar performance.
FreeBSD is the only one so far that works reasonably well on SMP hardware, the only one that has both ACLs and a MAC framework (I’m a bit of a security nut), and it has more software ported to it than the other BSDs. It’s the only one with a preemptible kernel (DragonFly’s isn’t exactly preemptible, but it seems to do fairly well with it’s fixed priority LWKT scheduling), and one of two (the other of course being NetBSD) that allows you to encrypt entire disks or partitions without needing third party software (IIRC, OpenBSD only allows you to encrypt swap out of the box. Puzzling no?).
I just remembered one more thing about my recent experience with 5.4 that irked me… the radeon module did not work as expected. As far as I could tell, it did exactly nothing. Same driver as in DragonFly, but no 3D accelleration. Maddening.
I may seem to be all over the map here, but it all makes sense when you realize one thing about me; I think that all software sucks, very very badly, and that there is nearly limitless room for improvement in all projects.