Migrating from Windows 2003 to FreeBSD

M

MisterDX

After looking for an alternative and playing under virtual machines with various different free OS'es I decided to use FreeBSD as my main operating system for my server. I have about 7 drives of which the main is a 40 GB drive where the OS Windows 2003 is installed.

Couple of questions :

  1. What version of FreeBSD would you recommend e.g. x32 or x64 bit due to possible software issues?
  2. I have a bunch of NTFS drives (big HDDs with data stored on them); do I need to convert them first to make them usable under FreeBSD? How to?

Any other tips?

Thanks
 
MisterDX said:
[*]What version of FreeBSD would you recommend e.g. x32 or x64 bit due to possible software issues?
Click to expand...
If only the server supports 64bit instructions, then definitely use them, if not, then stay 32bit.

MisterDX said:
[*]I have a bunch of NTFS drives (big HDDs with data stored on them); do I need to convert them first to make them usable under FreeBSD? How to?
Click to expand...
FreeBSD's base system only supports reading NTFS, You can use the sysutils/fusefs-ntfs to have read/write support for NTFS, use ntfs-3g then instead of FreeBSD base systems' mount_ntfs.
 
I just built by first 64bit FreeBSD machine. Most 32bit software works with it. And it's nice to have the extra memory if you need it (e.g. image processing applications), but otherwise I think I'd stick with 32bit for now. Really depends on the apps you intend to run.

As for NTFS, I wouldn't recommend extensive use of NTFS. The mount_ntfs is read only and the fusefs stuff doesn't work very well. Perhaps ok to fetch files occasionally, but not for routine use, IMHO.

As far as conversions, you can try to mount_ntfs r/o and copy onto a FreeBSD FS (UFS or ZFS), or use another PC (Windows) and copy over via Samba or similar.
 
If the thing is 64-bit, has a bit of RAM (say 4 GB or more) and will act as a storage server, I'd definitely recommend looking into ZFS for storage. One of the safest RAID solutions you can get with painless administration.
 
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