FreeBSD 8.3 vs FreeBSD 9.0

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Xaelem

Hi

What exactely is the differences between the two? My plan is to use it for proxy, firewall and fileserver. (Squid, Squidguard, Dansguardian, Samba and IPTABLES). I haven't come accross any clearcut differences between the two once up and running except 8.3 seems to boot up a bit quicker.
 
SirDice said:
Read the release notes. http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.0R/announce.html
Click to expand...


Thanks mate, but release notes tells me nothing. Like comparing a tiger and a cheetah: sure a cheetah is way more streamlined and fast but if I was to run either two in the wild the cheetah would be it because the tiger would maul the hell out of you.

I want to hear the side of the people that have used it. There are always people that claim anything new is worse than the old and I want to know what they consider that to be in this regard so I can decide whether it will influence my plans.

Thanks.
 
My personal view:

Generally I rate each update from one branch to the next one as a big risk.

FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE is supported until April 2014, so I do not need to upgrade my servers equipped with it for the next two years. FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE would probably be the last release from line 8, so in best case my machines could run two additional years with this branch.

New servers installed with FreeBSD 9.x will have a maximum life time with the 9.x branch for ~7 years, so I win three additional years.

So I leave my machines with FreeBSD 8.x running and set up new machines with the latest 9.x-RELEASE.

Best regards,
Shakky
 
Really the biggest difference between the two is the 9.X series may or may not have better support for some newer hardware that may not have worked on the 8.X series. In most cases these hardware changes do in fact get backported to the supported versions previous, in this case 8.x and 7.x however users of the 9 series will have the support first, and sometimes the bugs that will get fixed before back porting. I personally like to wait for the X.1 release before I go and upgrade from one major branch to the next, just so i avoid those crazy missed bugs when the branch went RELEASE. How ever I have one machine that I've had since 2001, that started on FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE and I've source upgraded it up to 8.3, with some grief going from 4.10 to 5.2 and 6.3 to 7.1 nothing that resulted in any downtime however. (This machine started as my webserver then in 5.3 became a PF router similar to what you described.) All this said, with regard to my penchant for going on and on and on and on and on... If this machine you have plans to use for your project is already setup as a FreeBSD machine running 8 series, then stay there and use it, If you have not installed anything yet, go ahead and go with the 9 series, you'll get a newer ZFS version and a newer version of PF (not that there's really any difference that I've seen). By the time you're all setup, 9.1 will be soon out and you can source upgrade it and enjoy all the benefits of knowing you've crossed the line into UNIX Geekdom. :)
 
v9 adds SUJ, a feature I really appreciate (One must use rsync (or...) rather than dump/restore with SUJ for now though...).
 
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