Operating system recommendation

[Fajar A. Nugraha]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 9:55 AM, Dan <dan at sunsaturn.com> wrote:
>
> I think there are really 2 sides to this, whether your after an OS easy to
> maintain, with great stability, or best performance. I think you'll fall in
> love with freebsd if you give it a try,

Try explaining that to managerial types who thinks "we will only use
enterprise-class software, anything else is inferior".

It took about ten years to get them to use RHEL/x86_64 as the default
first choice (to get price-performance-managability balance).
Previously they rather use solaris on a 650-MHz ultrasparc-ii instead
of Linux on 2GHz-Xeon (which kicked ultrasparc-ii's ass in both price
and performance). The reasoning back then was simple: none of the
local big guys (HP, IBM, etc.) offers support down to OS level when it
comes to Linux. Even when the current support contract with Sun does
not include OS support (it's pretty much "I feel safe cause they offer
it, but I don't wanna buy it").

We had to show "Our in-house team can manage by themselves even
without the local big guys" and "you can always purchase additional
support from principal if you need to". After several hundred
installations, they finally see that RHEL/x86_64 gets the job done
(for most purposes anyway) with only a fraction of cost.

... and they still reject using
Ubuntu/Gentoo/*BSD/opensolaris/whatever-other-*nix-you-name-it until
today :P

Since Pollex mentioned the need for support, IMHO RHEL/Centos is a good start.

> on otherhand if your after as many
> queries per second for a machine as possible, I have had better experience
> using epoll on linux vs kqueue on freebsd, programming network applications
> with libevent.

That's another thing. I haven't found other *nix running on x86 that
is able to reliably beat Linux performance-wise. (open)Solaris was
once promising (they published some benchmark about how solaris is
better than RHEL for running MySQL), but the current license/support
model made it unattractive for running on non-Sun/Oracle hardware.

>
> Then you have to factor in if you plan on getting the "latest" hardware all
> the time, which linux tends to support much quicker. Factor I usually
> consider is how much more performance vs headache of linux administration.
> Also consider freebsd has native ZFS support making it easy to swap in/out
> drives quickly for any I/O bottlenecks, as well as much more configuration
> options for anything you install though a "make config" in ports directory.

I used Gentoo (comes with Portage, similar to BSD ports) in the past.
While it's highly flexible, it becomes a hassle to compile the same
thing several hundred times.

Native zfs support is very attractive, but for the moment we can
substitue that by using (depending on circumstances):
- storage appliance (like NetApp)
- hw/sw raid + LVM
- btrfs
- zfs-fuse and zfsonlinux

>
> The last consideration should be your knowledge set of unix in general,
> if your linux understanding is really good, then it may be time to graduate
> from newbie linux admin to senior solaris/freebsd admin, only installing
> linux where necessary to make your life as easy as possible.

In my case it's the reverse direction :D

Started with Tru64, then move to Solaris and AIX, then found out Linux
makes life easier while still being able to reuse *nix knowledge (LVM,
clustering, journaling filesystem, etc). And then after being an
experienced Linux sysadmin, you'll began to see how those
Unix-local-support guys used to do stupid things (like NOT using UFS
journal by default on Solaris, resulting the need to fsck on every
abnormal shutdown).

In the end, to each his own preference, I guess.

-- 
Fajar