UPDATE - 2015-08-11: Frankly, at this point, I feel I made a mistake trusting FreeBSD for the important customer project I describe below. Now I'm stuck with this mistake, unable to put a more reliable OS on the server as it's almost 800 miles away from me.
UPDATE - 2015-08-23: FreeBSD is a really good OS although I encountered a serious issue with the Samba4 package in production. I apologize for the excess of emotion in my update above, and admit that the problem lies more with upstream and with the incompatibilities that can come up with some packages and the BSDs.
- - -
Original Post:
I just wanted to post a quick message about FreeBSD saving a project I was working on.
A customer wanted a secure server, running as an Active Directory domain controller with encryption on top of RAID mirroring. After the hardware assembly and testing was complete, I installed Ubuntu Server and did the configuration for mirroring and encryption.
After everything was set up and working, I noticed that a motherboard update was available and installed it before shipping it to the customer. Now Ubuntu started to force my CPU to the lowest possible speed and keep it there (even when it was set to 'Performance' in BIOS) and an even bigger issue; the system wouldn't reboot properly (it would get stuck right before it was supposed to reboot). Frustrated, I went ahead and flashed the motherboard again, thinking that the flash was somehow corrupt the first time. The two problems persisted. After some discouraged mumbling and grumbling, I went ahead and reinstalled Ubuntu again, only to face the same problems.
For much of last year (2014), I was a very unhappy camper when I tried FreeBSD. After months of testing and researching, I have finally found that devel/glib20 and x11-toolkits/gtk20 have problems which cause certain apps to abort, crash and so on during certain situations. Armed with this new information, I felt confident enough to migrate our company Linux file server to FreeBSD and have been very pleased with the performance and reliability (since it doesn't use x11-toolkits/gtk20 for server duties).
Pleased with FreeBSD's performance and reliability on my company server, I decided to try FreeBSD on this customer's server project. The first FreeBSD 10.1 install went fine, however Samba 4 appears not to work well with ZFS and ACLs. I found and applied workarounds for the ACL issues, but just could not get Windows client computers to work properly with it. I nuked the install and tried with UFS, then added RAID mirroring and encryption and everything appears to be working wonderfully now. No reboot issues and FreeBSD respects the CPU speed settings I set in BIOS.
Recently, I've been very happy with FreeBSD on the desktop, except for the reliability issues x11-toolkits/gtk20 causes. I'm really pleased that I could use FreeBSD on a customer project and I'm really hoping that it turns out to be a good decision in the long run.
Thank you, FreeBSD foundation, developers, moderators and even DutchDaemon!
UPDATE - 2015-08-23: FreeBSD is a really good OS although I encountered a serious issue with the Samba4 package in production. I apologize for the excess of emotion in my update above, and admit that the problem lies more with upstream and with the incompatibilities that can come up with some packages and the BSDs.
- - -
Original Post:
I just wanted to post a quick message about FreeBSD saving a project I was working on.
A customer wanted a secure server, running as an Active Directory domain controller with encryption on top of RAID mirroring. After the hardware assembly and testing was complete, I installed Ubuntu Server and did the configuration for mirroring and encryption.
After everything was set up and working, I noticed that a motherboard update was available and installed it before shipping it to the customer. Now Ubuntu started to force my CPU to the lowest possible speed and keep it there (even when it was set to 'Performance' in BIOS) and an even bigger issue; the system wouldn't reboot properly (it would get stuck right before it was supposed to reboot). Frustrated, I went ahead and flashed the motherboard again, thinking that the flash was somehow corrupt the first time. The two problems persisted. After some discouraged mumbling and grumbling, I went ahead and reinstalled Ubuntu again, only to face the same problems.
For much of last year (2014), I was a very unhappy camper when I tried FreeBSD. After months of testing and researching, I have finally found that devel/glib20 and x11-toolkits/gtk20 have problems which cause certain apps to abort, crash and so on during certain situations. Armed with this new information, I felt confident enough to migrate our company Linux file server to FreeBSD and have been very pleased with the performance and reliability (since it doesn't use x11-toolkits/gtk20 for server duties).
Pleased with FreeBSD's performance and reliability on my company server, I decided to try FreeBSD on this customer's server project. The first FreeBSD 10.1 install went fine, however Samba 4 appears not to work well with ZFS and ACLs. I found and applied workarounds for the ACL issues, but just could not get Windows client computers to work properly with it. I nuked the install and tried with UFS, then added RAID mirroring and encryption and everything appears to be working wonderfully now. No reboot issues and FreeBSD respects the CPU speed settings I set in BIOS.
Recently, I've been very happy with FreeBSD on the desktop, except for the reliability issues x11-toolkits/gtk20 causes. I'm really pleased that I could use FreeBSD on a customer project and I'm really hoping that it turns out to be a good decision in the long run.
Thank you, FreeBSD foundation, developers, moderators and even DutchDaemon!
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