FreeBSD Goals

[Nils Holland]

On Thursday 15 July 2004 19:09, Drews, Jonathan* wrote:

> 1) A robust way to make PPP connections through userland-ppp. I think
> FreeBSD's userland-ppp is better than what exists in Linux. I have used
> userland ppp with serial, USB and PCMCIA modems. In all three cases it
> worked very well.

Well, although this might be a slight bit off-topic to the OP's question, let 
me add that FreeBSD's user-ppp is one of the neatest things I've ever seen. 

I remember years back in some 6.x release of SuSE Linux when I was trying to 
get my ppp connection working. If I remember correctly SuSE used wvdial back 
then, and I sat for hours in front of my box getting it do do dial-on-demand 
as well as NAT the way I wanted it to. After some time I gave up on this 
wvdial thing and turned to pppd directly, trying to get the stuff done "the 
old way". Something similiar happened when I tried to get a PPP connection 
working in SuSE Linux 8.0 - it just didn't want to work the way *I* wanted it 
to.

Now, when first gave FreeBSD a spin in 2000 (actually, I installed my first 
FreeBSD on January 1st 2000 - really ;-)), I was highly amazed that after my 
first attempt to customize /etc/ppp/ppp.conf to suit my needs, a ppp -nat 
-auto <profile_name> worked right away just the way I wanted. No problems at 
all.

Why am I telling that? Well, before I came to FreeBSD, I assumed that stuff 
would be way more complicated there than it is on Linux. However, four and a 
half years later I absolutely cannot say that this is the case. I was 
positively impressed how well and easy everything actually works.

Additionally, I really wouldn't want to miss the occasional cvsupping, make 
{build,install}world and portupgrade procedure. I've never been able to 
figure out a sane way to keep a SuSE system (for example) up-to-date without 
having stuff totally messed up after a year or so. With FreeBSD ... well, 
keeping it up-to-date is another thing that works really great. I guess the 
version I'm running on this machine here was installed more than two years 
back and I've recently brought it to 4-STABLE (after the 4.10 release) and 
updated my KDE to 3.2.3 without much aford and trouble...

From the software side, I think it doesn't take long until one really 
appreciates the "FreeBSD way" of doing things. The only thing that in my 
opinion might be a strong point for Linux is hardware compatibility. After 
all, we must admit that Linux happens to support some stuff that FreeBSD 
currently doesn't. This, however, is more of a point when you have to install 
it on existing machines. If you know up front that you'll want to use 
FreeBSD, you will of course base your hardware buying decisions on that fact. 
And then, there shouldn't really be any problems...

Just my $ .02. ;-)

Greetings,
Nils

-- 
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