Re: [cobalt-users] Farwell to the Cobalt Community

[Jeff Lasman <blists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 18 December 2003 12:55 pm, Dave Reid wrote:

> I am sending this last message to say thanks and Farwell to the
> Cobalt community. For those who are curious, we are moving to a new
> server called Easy Admin from www.datapipe.com . It has a browser
> based interface designed by them that is far superior to the Cobalt
> interfaces with far more capabilities and features. Best of all they
> have a migration script that will migrate your cobalt RaQ3 or RaQ4 to
> the easy admin boxes.

Many of us are slowly but surely leaving our RaQs for other solutions.  
The main reason I wouldn't consider datapipe.com is you can only buy 
their solution as a hosted solution; i.e., you can't put it on your own 
server, you can't put the server in the data center of your choice.

> The Easy Admin servers are available on two
> platforms, Red Hat 9 and FreeBSD 4.8. We decided on Free BSD because
> Red Hat 9 will no longer be supported past April 2004, and I have
> been told by their tech support that FreeBSD is far more stable than
> any Red Hat based platform and much faster and of course it is true
> Unix, not Linux.

Let's separate the truth from the FUD:

FreeBSD 4.x (the stable branch) is already at 4.9, which according to 
their website will probably be the last version of 4.x.  Beyond that 
expect 5.x (now at 5.1) to become the stable branch within the year.  
FreeBSD, similarly to Linux, doesn't maintaing their releases for ever, 
and we in the know expect FreeBSD 4.8 to  be at end of life by the end 
of 2004, if not sooner.

In the meantime, commercial support has been announced by Progeny 
(http://www.progeny.com/products/transition/) for older Red Hat 
distributions; we expect to use them to continue to keep our RHL 
7.3-based servers up-to-date into the foreseeable future.

Is FreeBSD more stable than RedHat Linux?  That depends on your 
definition of stability.  Do you mean less likely to crash?  I think 
the uptime records are similar.  Do you mean less likely to be hacked?

While we find that more kernel attacks target RHL than FBSD, we also 
find that most of the hackable programs on both FreeBSD and Linux 
distributions are GPL-licensed GNU-based programs and other programs 
such as bind, apache, mysql, postgresql, php, perl, etc., that share 
the same code between both.

As far as the Unix vs Linux, that might have been an important 
consideration three years ago, but it isn't anymore; Linux is based on 
the same standards as Unix; they're both Posix compliant systems, and 
they're both based on a combination of ancient and modern code.

That said, while we're still delivering solutions on Linux (in our case 
RHL7.3, as most of us who work with RHLinux every day consider it the 
most mature and stable of the RHL server platforms), we're also 
studying FreeBSD as our future platform.  In our case that's not such a 
stretch; as we ran an ISP on BSDi Server (the "pay-for" version of BSD) 
for many years.

I wish you great success in your choice of platform; we use and highly 
recommend DirectAdmin, which runs on both RHL and on FreeBSD, includes 
installation, and offers many features and excellent value, including a 
full-support option.  http://www.directadmin.com/

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman, nobaloney.net, P. O. Box 52672, Riverside, CA  92517 US
Professional Internet Services & Support / Consulting / Colocation
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