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  • #2117349

    Unix vs NT, BSD vs Linux

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    by hkurt ·

    We are a midsize website development and training company. We are getting ready to purchase new dedicated servers.
    What direction should we go and why.

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    • #3857534

      Linux

      by epepke ·

      In reply to Unix vs NT, BSD vs Linux

      Go Linux. Why?

      1) It’s more common and better supported than BSD, though BSD is good, too.

      2) It’s way more stable than NT.

      3) There’s no way of predicting how Microsoft is going to dink with their operating system in order to extract moremoney from people in the next couple of years.

      • #3672281

        How should we compare?

        by hkurt ·

        In reply to Linux

        How should we compare the difference between support capabilities of BSD & Linux.

        We are leaning toward UNIX but now we need to really compare these OS’s.

    • #3671166

      Tough Call…

      by skkzarg_death ·

      In reply to Unix vs NT, BSD vs Linux

      It all depends on what your PRIMARY needs are. You said your a training company. Do you train end users, or web developers? If its end users, you will need a user friendly OS like Windows, if your training people with a modicum of technical knowledge, Linux offers better performance and stability at a lower cost (in both HW and SW).
      Your talking servers here, and that will depend on what your client machines are and what they are used for (and by whom.)
      Additional info would really help if you can provide it.

      As far as a question between BSD and Linux, I thought BSD was a flavor of Linux….either way, my linux experience doesnt sit high enough for me to recommend one flavor over another, so I will leave that part of the discussion toothers.

      I encourage you to look at your end user, and decide on server OS to best suit their needs. What they need to do, and how much you can expect them to reasonably learn (if needed) will determine your answer.

      Skkz

      • #3671165

        Also…

        by skkzarg_death ·

        In reply to Tough Call…

        It may be that you want to go with a dual solution. Use linux/apache for web deployment(dang near never crashes – DO NOT USE IIS for web deployment if you can help it!!!), while running a MS base for your training side. Once again.. it all boils down to your needs and the needs of your clients.

        Skkz

      • #3671030

        Thank you for additional insight.

        by hkurt ·

        In reply to Tough Call…

        You have raised a valuable consideration. Primarily our training involves website development and management with very little server side information.

        But you are correct our clients need to come first it what ever direction we take.

        I thoughtLinux was a flavor of BSD.

        Kurt

        • #3670521

          Linux is not BSD. But both are good.

          by chrisct ·

          In reply to Thank you for additional insight.

          Linux is not a flavor of BSD, and BSD is not a flavor of Linux. However, there are Linux compatibility options with the newer releases of FreeBSD.
          To get back to your original question, you will get better performance with Unix, Linux, or BSD than Windows. Windows 2000 is a dog (See Network World magazines article on SQL on Win2K vs. NT 4.0). As someone else mentioned, there is a learning curve for Unix, but it’s well worth the investment. Also, Linux and BSD are free, so you’ll save some $$ up front. And if you want to go with a commercial version of Unix so you can get support (and you’ll have to pay), check out Sun or IBM’s (AIX) offerings.

          Chris.

        • #3670440

          Thank you for additional insight.

          by hkurt ·

          In reply to Linux is not BSD. But both are good.

          We will check out Sun and IBM offerings

          Kurt

      • #3670609

        I hate the color of blue!

        by wpowell ·

        In reply to Tough Call…

        If you don’t want 2am. wakeup calls and you shudder at the thought of informing users that the system must go down for maintenance or you need to reboot plus you hate the color blue . . . then unix is your best bet!

      • #3698782

        Time to earn your money

        by r_upchurch ·

        In reply to Tough Call…

        Do this right! Don’t fall into the paradime of, “We never have time to do it right, but we have the time to rework it.” Abe Lincoln once said, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my axe.” In other words plan andresearch. Where do you start? Become intimate with the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Type this into a search engine and go from there. Good Luck!

    • #3670975

      Linux VS. NT

      by mjervis ·

      In reply to Unix vs NT, BSD vs Linux

      I would suggest going with linux. However there up are pro’s and con’s to both. You must have a good system administrator for whatever OS you ultimately go with.
      My suggestion for linux is based on my expierience. I am a system administrator for both types of operating systems. With NT you must reboot at odd hours to keep the system happy. If you have users connected at those times they will get very upset with you rebooting the system. I also notice a lot of memory problems with NT. The linuxsystems I have are basically for the most part maintainence free. I go by them once a week to make sure the fans are working properly and they are still on.
      If my boss had to do it all over again he would go with my original suggestion of linux.
      As far as what flavor of linux to go with? That depends on who you find to administer the system. Red Hat is easier to administer, while Debian is more secure. Either way they are both more secure than NT.
      Get a system administrator and ask him/her thier strengths and weaknesses before you decide on the OS but make sure they know enough about the OS to run and administer it for you.

    • #3672009

      Linux hands down

      by t. e. walker ·

      In reply to Unix vs NT, BSD vs Linux

      NT crashes, BSD you have to write everything for by hand, Linux… runs. Need I say more?
      Red Hat would be my choice but Debian has pros too – flip a coin, either is better than BSD and way better than NT.

      • #3671910

        Door Number 3… Windows 2000.

        by edward clint ·

        In reply to Linux hands down

        I have been in a mixed environment long enough to know Linux/unix fail periodically. Unless it is not doing anything interesting, it is little more stable than a well-run NT box. And by well-run I mean no buggy apps, and fully compatible hardware and non-essentials removed. The “stable” unix boxes are the same way.
        I think the hype has more to do with the admins than the OSs. The *nix admins being more savvy.

        Either way… Windows 2000 seems to end all that nonsense. I never reboot my win2k servers, barring major software/config or hardware changes. Certainly not on any regular basis. Our win2k desktops are even more stable. Many have never been rebooted, after initial install.

        By the way, I have never had to schedule daily(nor weekly nor monthly) reboots of *any* of my NT 4.0 servers to ‘preserve sanity’. If I did, I would seriously examine the constitution of the box and start replacing things. That is not the normal state of NT.

        I think *nix is pretty cool. But the absurd all unix = unflinching rock and all nt = unstable catastrophe in progress propoganda is just inane and needs to end.

        -E

        • #3671845

          Thank you for additional insight.

          by hkurt ·

          In reply to Door Number 3… Windows 2000.

          I strongly agree with your anti propagand positions. Would you like to expound on box integrity.

          Kurt

        • #3671828

          Very well put! & FREE Win2K Adv Server

          by dblizzard ·

          In reply to Door Number 3… Windows 2000.

          We are running 1 NT box and 3 Win2K boxes. 1 NT and 2 Win2k are web servers. One for our company web pages and 2 for our web hosting services. We host our clients web pages and many of them use Active Server Pages so Windows was our choice. The other box runs our Client/Server accounting software and it only runs on NT/2000. We never reboot our servers unless we install an app that requires it but that is rare after initial setup. the NT box is colocated in another state so I know that box has never been rebooted except when I see event viewer showing “restarted unexpectedly” which means my co-lo company either moved it or their UPS system sucks 🙂
          I have used another nt box to restart PCAnywhere on the co-lo because it wouldn’t let me in but I wouldn’t blame MS. I won’t bad-mouth linux because I don’t use it. But cut some slack because Windows Servers work. Oh! by the way, you can get up to 25 free copies of Win2k Advanced Server if you host 100 web sites on each, so.. NO! I didn’tpay a fortune for 3 copies of the Win2k OS. And.. yes I make money with MS as my partner in both OEM software, hardware and web hosting ventures.
          http://www.microsoft.com/ISN/working_ms/eap.asp

        • #3670433

          This is encouraging

          by hkurt ·

          In reply to Very well put! & FREE Win2K Adv Server

          Its to see less os hate mongerers out there these days.

          Kurt

      • #3695211

        BSD is cool

        by shalkebaeva ·

        In reply to Linux hands down

        I like write all by my hands. Because once you wrote and you always know what you write. And you will know where to find errors. It hard to study but if understand idea it will be very intresting for you

        • #3694418

          Thank You

          by hkurt ·

          In reply to BSD is cool

          How long have you been working with BSD

    • #3670506

      What others are using.

      by chrisct ·

      In reply to Unix vs NT, BSD vs Linux

      You can check out what your favorite sites are running at:
      http://www.netcraft.com/whats/

      When I run across a slow site, I always check what they are running. Seems like 9 times out of 10 it’s IIS on Windows. Yahoo.com, which has pretty good performance and uptime, is running FreeBSD.

      Chris.

    • #3671453

      decide by your needs and your abilities

      by admin ·

      In reply to Unix vs NT, BSD vs Linux

      I would highly recommend assessing your network staffs abilities and what you actually want to do with it. They all, (even Microsoft- if you have read my posts in other discussions) have advantages and disadvantages. The important thing is the right”fit” for your needs. Discussions of which one is “best” don’t really matter , IMHO, to you as a business, unless the discussion is with those who intimately know your business and will operate the servers.

      Having said that, I personally prefer the different Unix flavors generally because, In My Humble Experience, they require less maintenance and I can set them up faster, but that really depends on YOUR IT staffs comfort, knowledge and abilities. Make sure whatever you chose includes solid people to run it that understand your particular way of doing business and, ideally, know more than one OS intimately….the more the better. I would shy away from consultation that only understands one OS (usually Linux or MS fanatics)…..

      Just my 2 cents… 🙂

    • #3698729

      Something safe

      by cavedweller ·

      In reply to Unix vs NT, BSD vs Linux

      I think I would make my PDC NT so that I could administer the domain using organic tools.

      File servers could be either. I’ve had no trouble with my Dell NT servers. I have had some trouble with applications (like database servers and such) hanging which forced a reboot. I always suggest putting things like that on a seperate server if it’s in the budget.

      If you want to go Linux but aren’t sure which one, you might consider the version that can be ordered pre-loaded on your selected hardware. The manufacturer probably spent some time making sure the basic setup was correct. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tune things for your operation, just that you had a good starting point.

      Web servers, same thing. Choose the one that runsthe web server software you like.

      I agree with the previous posts that the various Unix/Linux releases require different admin skills than NT. This doesn’t have to be a problem though. Just make sure you have someone who knows the systems you buy.

    • #3696251

      Unix v NT, BSD v Linux

      by nyk ·

      In reply to Unix vs NT, BSD vs Linux

      Firstly are you heterogenous? If not then stick with the platform you have already unless you are planning on training or recruiting. Now that we got that out of the way here is my personal choice and why.

      NT has weaknesses – it has limitations hence the arrival of Win2000 (particularly active directory). Microsoft have a history of it’s software being exploited from Office Applications to Operating systems. Win2000 is no different. As for performance, Microsoft try very hard. They have pledged that any new code written has to be done in such a way as to not require rebooting of the OS (primarily Servers I’m assuming). If this cannot be achieved, senior management needs to authorise it. Let’s wait and see.
      So for me a Microsoft based server gets 5/10.

      Unix has many flavours and costs because you are basically buying into that particular platform. Saying that, you pay for what you get which includes high quality service and support via the software and hardware vendors. Initial and running costs are very much higher if you move away from Intel based systems, but you get the performance and reliability. Unix gets a healthier 7/10

      Ok, the fight is really between BSD and Linux. Well, choose your poison. As far as I can see on a security level they are both as good as each other (maybe BSD pips a tad).
      LX PitBull (Argus) has ported to Linux. As far as Im concerned… unless you have a hardware preference either one will do (I will be criticisd for that statement, but then a marmalade man wouldn’t switch to jam on my say so).

      I hope that’s made sense and has been helpful. This is just an observation, and personal choices.
      Remember to cincider running a previous version of Linux and check the portability of theproducts you intend to run.
      Personal favourite is SuSE followed by RedHat and Mandrake.
      Ohh, the scores….. well? to be fair, 9/10 for both BSD and Linux.

      • #3695277

        No free lunches, as always…

        by uxadm ·

        In reply to Unix v NT, BSD v Linux

        As a Unix systems administrator for a large
        corporation’s mixed environment of nine HP,
        six Sun, two AT&T, and two Linux server
        systems, as well as twenty NT boxes, I have
        had the opportunity to learn the differences
        of these Unix systems.
        Performance is important, of course, but
        since the big vendors alternately take the
        speed lead, new system purchase is sometimes
        arbitrary. Reliability and stability in
        hardware and software are key, however, since
        they translate to application up-time. The HP
        servers have been best in longevity (nine
        months before a hardware upgrade forced a
        shut down). Sun hardware and software goes
        down a little more frequently, but is still
        respectable. Vendor support has been
        excellent from both, helping even us
        experienced admins get past wierd and nasty
        problems any time of day on any day.

        Linux (Red Hat) is cheap and, once set up
        properly, very solid. Our old Intel boxes
        have been problematic. Linux support, not as
        sophisticated (or costly) as that of HP and
        Sun, is erratic, sometimes very good and
        sometimes very poor, providing a wide range
        of possible solutions; so we guess and test a
        lot. We get past our problems OK, it simply
        can take a lot of work, time and frustration.

        Administration of the systems followed along
        the same lines: HP being more advanced (thus
        less time consuming) than Sun, and Sun better
        than Linux. This is simply a case of sys
        admin software tools being developed for
        each. HP’s SAM is excellent. Sun has several
        tools, some excellent, some quite weak.
        Linux requires more file editing, thus more
        knowledge and time.

        So, the moral of this story is that there is
        a trade-off that is not always obvious. A
        vendor’s higher priced, highly available
        system that requires less management time may
        actually have a significantly lower
        cost-of-ownership than a low priced, high
        management system. Linux offers a l

        • #3694422

          Thank you for additional insight.

          by hkurt ·

          In reply to No free lunches, as always…

          Thank you for the sincere effert put forth in assisting us.

          Kurt

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