[Gllug] Redhat 9 and moving distribution: your experience

[Doug Winter]

On Wed 30 Apr Tethys wrote:
> It's usable for servers, but it wouldn't be my first choice (at
> least for a public facnig machine -- internal servers are slightly
> different). Red Hat hasn't been a good server OS for a while now
> -- the base install is simply too bloated. But then again, most
> distributions are the same. OpenBSD's looking like a remarkably good
> server choice these days...

Yep - I use OpenBSD for all our server-based stuff here (the stuff that
isn't Solaris anyhow), and I like it a lot.

It's not as reliable as Linux on random dodgy x86 hardware in my
experience, largely due to the smaller user population I suspect.  The
developers also appear to have less interest in supporting poor quality
hardware.  

I can strongly recommend it for firewalling too - I've got an Ultra 5
SPARC system doing IPSec, PPTP, packet filtering and traffic shaping and
it's a whole load better than the Firewall-1 system we used to use.

If you are willing to put decent kit in your machines (I don't mean the
most expensive, just reasonable quality) then it works very nicely.
It's not for the faint-hearted though - the developers are religious
about applying KISS at every stage, which can be a bit of a shock if you
are used to more 'modern' operating systems.

The tone of the mailing lists is also somewhat unique.  I can recommend
them if you enjoy watching really top-quality flaming :)

d.

-- 
The evil done by men of goodwill is the worst of all.
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