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Old 6th April 2009
mwatkins mwatkins is offline
Flying Circus Master
 
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Vancouver
Posts: 23
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I recently had to pick a Linux to work with; aside from a very short stint using Linux over 10 years ago (a shared hosting services provider) I've used FreeBSD exclusively. I needed a Virtual Private Server with decent memory and CPU allotment to act as a temporary transfer place for apps and data stuck on a vintage FreeBSD box and I couldn't find a decent price for such a thing running FreeBSD. Plus it seemed like a good time to branch out and see how the other side of the fence lives.

I suppose I should like the SysV style since my prior Unix experience was commercial SysV - DG/UX - but 10 years have erased that muscle memory and I keep reaching for /etc/rc.conf and ports.

I chose Debian partly on reputation, partly because it felt more developer-targeted, partly because it had a large number of packages and wasn't aimed at desktop users primarily.

While apt-get and friends works well enough, I find myself downloading sources (apt-get source pkgname) fairly often. Habit perhaps, I built ports from sources rather than installed packages in FreeBSD. But mostly its the package maintainer's choices of dependencies that I have trouble with. Far too many include a ton of stuff I don't want (MySQL being a common offender).

I also find myself downloading sources direct from the provider because many packages are older than I'd like to run. I want an up to date lighttpd, dovecot, postfix, for example.

With my FreeBSD hat on I would sometimes be saddened at lag time in ports showing up and, without any evidence of this, believed that the Linux world had it better. I now see that there are trade offs. Choose Debian and you'll get one philosophy and older "ports". Perhaps another flavour is as up to date as FreeBSD ports or more so.

Incidentally I think I've become sold on virtualization and am going to have to play some with Jails as well as OpenVZ and Xen and get up to speed. There do seem to be some interesting administrator / fault recovery advantages even if one isn't reselling these "slices" of a machine to others.

I'm glad I had this Linux interlude; but am angling to find a way to replace this one VPS instance with another running FreeBSD, so if anyone has any providers they like that offer such things at a good price/performance/stability point I'm all ears.

Due to the experience, whether its Linux or FreeBSD based, a relatively cheap VPS is probably going to become a DNS and secondary mail server for my collection of other machines soon.
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