FreeBSD 5.4: Is it generally unstable?

[Claus Guttesen]

> Many seasoned unix people have spoken to me about how much more stable
> FreeBSD is, although at the risk of starting a flame war I'm not convinced
> that this is still the case, at least not for the 5 series vs Trustix. (vs
> most linux distributions - sure :D )

I have 9 webservers, two nfs-servers, one firewall and one
samba-server all running RELENG_5_4, some even on the Dell PE 2850
without any problems. The webservers are reasonably loaded in the
evening, the nfs-servers pushes some GB during the day, rsync etc.
without any problems.

> Ports are cool. Trustix doesn't provide an exim package, so I'm forever
> updating that myself.

One very *nice* app that FreeBSD has is
/usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade and is worth installing, makes
updating much more convenient rather than doing the upgrade manually.

It even creates a package for you if you use the -p parameter
(lowercase p), and if you make the /usr/ports/packages directory it
will place the created packages with the same layout as the
ports-collection itself. Nfs-mount the ports-directory from another
host and upgrading apps suddenly becomes a matter of minutes (using
the -P parameter (uppercase p)).

Claus