On 2003-10-28 at 17:36 +0300, Odhiambo G. Washington wrote:
> Shouldn' you just get FreeBSD out of the picture? ;-)
The OS is never out of the picture.
For any system administration of more than one box (or perhaps three if
you like repeating yourself) infrastructure starts to become important.
Part of infrastructure is maintenance of software and its updates.
If an OS has a widely-used package management system and you can work
cleanly with that, then this can greatly ease deployment of updates:
build package, deploy to test box, test a lot and then, if no problems,
deploy elsewhere.
How closely a site approaches this ideal is a different matter. But
certainly the "best" solution for one site often depends on the OS.
For instance, we've been looking at various changes to make to our
mail-system, now that almost all inbound mail flows through Exim 4
(except in one corner case). One colleague got our custom POP3 code
running on FreeBSD, all apparently working; but they didn't test on
multiple boxes at once, so didn't pick up on the fact that FreeBSD 4
doesn't handle NFS locks at the network level -- they're all local to
the system. But FreeBSD 5 does support NLM stuff under NFS, so we're
looking at a near-future migration there (once we're happy with the
stability of that branch). In the mean-time, we design the network
around the OS choices available.
For another instance, some spam/virus-filtering solutions are
binary-only from vendors and can be hooked into from Exim, but you need
to either run on the correct OS or on an OS which has suitable binary
emulation.
It's rare that an application can be considered to stand on its own with
the OS being irrelevant; once you tie two applications together, the OS
is much more likely to be relevant.
--
2001: Blogging invented. Promises to change the way people bore strangers with
banal anecdotes about their pets. <
http://www.thelemon.net/issues/timeline.php>
