[Tfug] Maintainable free UNIX

[Scott Corey]

Maintaining osef.org's research and development machine's has and is a 
challenge, especially since I am now in Oklahoma (One of these days I will 
come home). And both of them are FreeBSD-Stable. Not only is CVSup superior 
to other systems updating ( Including Debian, Harry), but combining the Make 
World process with PORTUPGRADE program, makes the task far simplier.

We do weekly rebuilds of the complete machine. It takes about 3 hours total 
time. With only one reboot. So actual downtime is for the reboot only. Who 
could ask for more, a completely new src and rebuild in three hours, and a 3 
minute downtime, not bad!

On Wednesday 31 July 2002 09:04 am, Keith Davey wrote:
> Well with Linux comming of age and other free unixes also continuing to
> mature I was wonders about system mainatablility between all these
> diffrent systems.  Day in and day out we here about this Linux install is
> so easy and these system administration tools are so cool, but in the end
> we are likly to install a system once and in theory maintain it thur
> patches and upgrades for the life of the system.  My question in
> particular is one of opinion.  What free unix system do you feel is the
> most maintainable and why?  Conversely what free unix systems do you feel
> are the hardest to maintain and why?
> .
> Personaly I find the the most maintanable system I have worked with to be
> FreeBSD.  CVSup may not be unique to FreeBSD but it sure is nice when
> coupled with the ability to rebuild the system from source on the fly.
> Patching individual modules and rebuilding just those modules on the fly
> is great as well.  My second selection would be Debian with apt-get.
> Least mantainable it seems to me is RedHat.  First off I have never been a
> fan of straite RPM.  Dependancy problems aside its just clunky to work
> with.  RPM coupled with a upper level dependancy DB like in SUSE works ok,
> but the SUSE tools to perform upgrades and patches is to slow (YAST2 sucks
> the big one!).
> .
> Ok opinions welcome but please lets try not to make this into a pissing
> contest (Bowie!)
> .
> Keith Davey
> 
> 
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Scott B. Corey, President, CTO, Co-Founder
scorey@osef.org, Call Harry's (520) 661-7875 (CELL)
Open Source Education Foundation, http://www.osef.org
A non-profit tax exempt charitable organization