Originally posted by Kazan
then you shouldn't be using Bezerkly Systems Distribution
First, that's "
Berzerkeley", and its a hackish reconstruction of Berkeley Software Distribution. What do they teach you lot in school these days?
Kazan, Unix administration is what I do for a living, day in and day out, for the last 10yrs. I've adminned HP-UX, Solaris/SunOS, Ultrix, BSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSDi, Redhat, Mandrake, Slackware, and Debian. Hell, I spent some time running Minix and VMS systems in the Navy. In that time, I've had the "pleasure" of administering Microsoft networks of various flavors, Banyan Vines networks and Novell networks. I've played with one or two [N]OSs in my day. Just one or two.
In my experience between in ISP/Webhosting companies, the Navy, and educational jobs, I've discovered something: Linux is not stable, nor secure. Of course, I should clarify that: the distributions of Linux I've seen used in server room environements are not stable, nor secure. This includes, but is not limited to: Redhat, Debian, Slackware and (of all things) Mandrake. That's not a representative sample, of course, since there's only slightly fewer distros than there are Linux users. Its not that they're bad, its just that they are not good primetime systems--IN MY OPINION. Linux is certainly very good for making sure that you'll have support for every random and obscure piece of hardware on the planet. It is certainly great for being on the cutting edge. I'm not a cutting edge kind of administrator.
I'm a sleep at night and late into the morning administrator. I'm a go on vacation and not worry about the mobile going off sort of administrator. I like predictable things. I like things with a minimum of security issues. The fewer hours I spend trying to fix things, the more money per hour I earn (I'm on salary). If I can keep my hours down to 25-30 per week, I'm doing good. I run BSD systems for that reason, particularly OpenBSD. One would think, given my old SystemV roots, I would abhor the setup of a BSD derivative system. Quite the contrary, I find it sane, stable, and simple to manage. I can consistently get higher uptime out of a FreeBSD system than out of an (as far as humanly possible) identical Linux system. That's just MY experience.
I'm not bashing Linux (I dislike current linux distros on the basis of fact and experience, not some advocacy/zealotry thing). If there was a Linux distro that met my needs better than *BSD, my new servers would be built on that distro, and I'd migrate the BSD systems. The less work I do, the more I earn per hour. Its that simple.
I'd rather run a Linux box than a Windows box for most serious work. I'd rather run a BSD box than either Linux or Windows.