FreeBSD’s Murray Stokely says that the FreeBSD team has resolved many of the issues brought up with the first release candidate and made FreeBSD RC2 ISO available for testing. They are especially interested in hearing from people who can deploy this on heavily loaded systems.
FreeBSD 4.9-RC2 Available
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Eugenia Loli
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My cellphone provider is using Windows 2003/.NET Enterprise Server RC2 for their load-balancing system.
It’s not working right now.
I hope they don’t charge me extra for the late payment, I will be very irate if they do (stupid Telus).
Anyway, my point is … be wary of using ReleaseCandidates in essential subsystems. Like the subsystems that bring in your operating income.
Well, yes, I know – but it’s hardly a sound business decision to throw caution to the wind when your primary line of income could be at stake (in the case of financial transaction systems). There is a reason that FreeBSD-4.x-STABLE exists, after all.
Nobody said use it on a live, public facing system… There are different kinds of “heavily loaded systems”.
If it was a server you could even have a proxy send a copy of all requests to a test machine, and discard the response (besides maybe a quick check to see if same as from the known good machine).
FreeBSD 4.x release candidates and prereleases are milestones in the FreeBSD-STABLE branch. They are the most stable releases available to date.
actually FreeBSD 4.x release candidates are NOT the most stable builds to date. The most recent stable build to date is FreeBSD 4.8 that is why this is the official release of FreeBSD. The release candidates have new features and possible instabilities. That’s why they are marked as release candidates and not actual releases.
Also, it seems that you believe that the FreeBSD-STABLE branch is always stable. This is not true. FreeBSD-STABLE is where new features are vetted into the current release series (4.x right now) and their stability is proven. On any given day FreeBSD-STABLE might be extremely stable or unstable it all depends on what is currently being checked in. It is not a good practice to run a production machine on these sources they are only there to prepare for the actual stable releases.
how many RCs before a release? 3-4?
Could you point me in the right direction as to how to set that up?
I agree that -STABLE isn’t always just that, stable. Take a look at the recent PAE troubles, for example. Point taken.
However, if you look at the CVS logs (check out the cvs-src mailing list) you will also have to agree that a great many stability issues are adressed in recent 4.x releases. And as for security, you really don’t want to be running 4.8-RELEASE now!
The Real Truth probably lies in a whole different branch called RELENG_4_8 (and RELENG_4_9 to come) that sticks with the provided functionality, committing only necessary security and stability changes.
I agree that -STABLE isn’t always just that, stable. Take a look at the recent PAE troubles, for example. Point taken.
But there is no 4.9-STABLE… yet. The last -STABLE kernel released was 4.8, and it of course doesn’t have PAE support…
However, if you look at the CVS logs (check out the cvs-src mailing list) you will also have to agree that a great many stability issues are adressed in recent 4.x releases. And as for security, you really don’t want to be running 4.8-RELEASE now!
Why is that, because of the recent OpenSSH vulnerabilities? Those can easily be addressed by building OpenSSH from the openssh-portable port. Or is there some other issue you are attempting to broach but didn’t even bother to mention?
People don’t seem to understand the FreeBSD release system.
No one (with almost no exception) should be running 4.8-RELEASE, as there’s several security patches to the branch dealing with OpenSSH, sendmail, and kernel problems. For the most part, everyone should be using the RELENG_4_8 cvsup tag. It only commits security patches and really bad bugs (crash the system in normal use type). If you don’t like the recompiling world, you might try http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-update/. I don’t use it, but it seems promising.
There better info on the different tags at:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvs-tags….
and the different update systems at:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors.h…
The only STABLE branch that is currently active is the 4-STABLE branch. There is no such thing like 4.{x}-STABLE. The only reason that it’s marked as 4.8-STABLE or whatever other version is to indicate the -RELEASE milestone it spans.
Like I said: the -STABLE branch continues to move forward, and when certain usability goals are met the Release Engineering team brands it with a specific version number. A 4.8 or 4.9-RELEASE is nothing but a snapshot of the -STABLE tree, although admittedly that tree will have been feature-freezed for a while.
Checkout http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.8R/errata.html and skip ahead to the “Security Advisories” section. There are too many vulnerabilities to mention here that don’t solve themselves by opting for a port.