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

[Chris Adams <cmadams@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Once upon a time, Dave Reid <daver1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
> We decided on Free BSD because Red Hat 9 will no
> longer be supported past April 2004,

You should check the support date for FreeBSD 4.8 if that is a concern
to you.  From http://www.FreeBSD.org/security/, the estimated EOL for
security updates for 4.8 is March 31, 2004.  FreeBSD releases generally
have a 12 month support cycle (same as what Red Hat did for RHL 9).

If you want a stable platform with longer term support, check out Red
Hat Enterprise Linux (with a 5 year support cycle).  If you want free
support for RHL, check out the Fedora Legacy project (currently
targeting RHL 7.3 and 9 for longer term support).

If you want stable SMP support, you'll probably want Linux (or
Slowaris/x86) instead of *BSD, although FreeBSD does have some SMP
support available now.

> and I have been told by their tech
> support that FreeBSD is far more stable than any Red Hat based platform
> and much faster

Both of those tend to be matters of some debate, with both sides
pointing their way.  I had a Linux (RHL 6.2) database server that ran
for 1341 days (over 3.6 years) without a reboot; I only had to shut it
down because we moved the NOC.

> and of course it is true Unix, not Linux.

No, *BSD is not "true Unix".  Only AT&T based code is "true Unix" (i.e.
Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, SCO Unixware).  As part of the settlement of the
AT&T/BSD lawsuit, the BSD core code was stripped clean of AT&T code.
That's what set the *BSD versions back and when Linux got started
(otherwise there probably never would have been a Linux).

Today, anything that passes a set of tests can use the trademark and
call itself "Unix", but to my knowledge, neither FreeBSD nor Linux has
done this.  I think one of the Europe-based Linux distributions was
working on this, but I don't think they succeeded (there are a few
things that Linux just does different because the standard is stoopid).
The only major non-AT&T Unix-like system that I know of to pass the
tests and be called Unix is DEC OSF/1 aka Digital Unix aka Compaq Tru64
Unix aka HP Tru64 Unix (which started out as a BSD based system).

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams@xxxxxxxxxx>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.