FreeBSD users in eZ Community

Monday 07 March 2005 4:40:50 pm

I'm reading with interest about the advantages of FreeBSD as a stable, secure OS, and I want to strongly consider its use with an eZpublish site running on a cluster.

I've already read many eZ forum posts about FreeBSD, but I'd like to discuss the merits of FreeBSD off-forum with anyone that's interested in sharing their email address with me. (Mine is: [email protected])

I've scanned the forums and came up with a list of eZp users who have run on FreeBSD:

Gabriel Ambuehl, Egil Fujikawa Nes, Alex Jones, Derick Rethans, Edward Eliot,
Plamen Petkov, Björn [email protected], Wizzbit Netherlands, Mike Rembisz, Eric Griff

Would any of you be willing to email me to discuss this topic or would you prefer to do so on this thread?

Tom C
[email protected]

Tuesday 08 March 2005 7:42:01 am

Gabriel, thanks for the reply.

My questions fall into the following categories, requesting a comparison of your FreeBSD experiences with systems running eZ publish on Debian, or Redhat and Suse Linux.

(Not in any order of priority)

1. Security
* FreeBSD rated the most secure OS, in part to its small market share and publicity
article: http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/feedback.php

2. _Uptime_
* The sites with top uptime all have FreeBSD or BSD/OS platforms
article: http://www.mi2g.net/cgi/mi2g/press/051104.php
Netcraft stats: http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html

3. Compatibility with eZ publish
forums reveal issues with FreeBSD; are they more or less frequent than with Linux, and how much trouble is it to fix the problems?

4. Support from eZ systems
given the main emphasis on a Linux system, how much more expense is involved with obtained support or bug fixes to keep eZ publish running on FreeBSD OS. I can understand why a company may wish to focus on only one OS.

5. Availability and expense of FreeBSD experts
* Though Netcraft states that FreeBSD sites number over 2 million, what is your experience in finding help?

6. Performance and Efficient use of hardware
(low hardware cost per unit of data transfer)
(benchmarked eZpublish site speed equal to or better than linux on comparable box)

7. Lifecycle operating and maintenance costs

8. Headache factor (how much frustration relative to any other system)

9. Availability and total cost of clustered solutions
* Can FreeBSD be used with many load-balancing and distributed solutions that work for Linux?

Tuesday 08 March 2005 11:09:16 am

1 security is a process, not a product. Admins without a clue can't make any system secure. Probably more secure than linux due to better development process.

2 FreeBSD generally doesn't go down (few exceptions, but usually hardware is at fault). Nor does any real OS.

3 No problem whatsoever

4 No idea. Neither do I care.

5 Again, we have inhouse knowledge (if you don't, you should outsource server operations from begin with)

6 Probably doesn't matter much. I sure wouldn't care, hardware's cheap. In some benchmarks, Linux is faster, others are won by one of the BSDs

7 Depends on the knowledge of the admins. But probably lower than Linux if admin's worth something.

8 Much less than Linux which is in turn much better than Windows. Unless you want to run Java, in which case either chose Linux or Solaris.

9 Depends. Linux based approaches normally don't work out of box (most aren't worth shit though), stuff like Cisco Localdirector etc doesn't care for the OS behind it. Neither does DNS based load balancing. I think the Coyote load balancing stuff was actually FreeBSD based and I know that Juniper (about as fast routers as they come) are heavily based on FreeBSD (but routing's done in hardware, off the shelf components don't get nearly that throughput).

Visit http://triligon.org

Tuesday 08 March 2005 10:27:43 pm

Hi Tom,

Here you can find some statistics about security in FreeBSD.
http://secunia.com/product/1132/?period=2004

Personal website -> http://serwatka.net
Blog (about eZ Publish) -> http://serwatka.net/blog

Wednesday 09 March 2005 1:04:31 am

Now that benchmark I sure would like to see...

Visit http://triligon.org