[MUD-Dev] Preference for host OS

[Jon Leonard]

On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 11:35:54PM -0700, Brian Hook wrote:

> I don't want this to get into a religious war, but I'm curious
> about anecdotal data when it comes to the preference in hosting
> operating systems.  I'm doing some preliminary research right now,
> and the obvious candidates seem to be:

>From a MUD perspective, the right answer is to write portable code,
or at least isolate OS dependencies in a few places.  The MUD server
will outlive the particular OS release, and may need to be ported
anyway.

So from that perspective, it really doesn't matter.

If you're considering this in more of a commercial hosting
environment, you really can't divorce the OS from the questions
about hardware & admins...

But I'll give my preferences anyway.

>   - Windows NT/2000 Server (expensive)

I don't personally like Windows variants, and have no idea how to
secure this, so I wouldn't run it.  For that matter, it seems like a
waste of money in this context.

>   - OpenBSD
>   - FreeBSD
>   - NetBSD

These three look more or less the same from my limited viewpoint,
though they do have different supported hardware.  Reasonable
choices.

>   - various forms of Linux (RH,Debian,Mandrake,SuSE, etc.)

I run Debian, mostly because it's easier to secure.

>   - Solaris (anyone bother?)

This would be the obvious choice if you want to run on Sun hardware.
I haven't followed Sun hardware much since I stopped designing it,
but it was good stuff a few years ago.

>   - OS X server (doubtful since hardware is very expensive)

Similar issue as with Solaris, only for different hardware.  (And I
never followed mac hardware, so I don't know.)

> I'm sure there are MUDs that still run on AmigaDOS or OS/2 or
> something, but I doubt they're mainstream =)

It's not worth setting it up it for one message, but I bet my
codebase would run under AmigaDOS with only minor tweaks.

> The factors that seem to be the crux of an OS choice are probably
> price, robustness, security, performance, and ease of
> installation/administration/development.  I've done some Linux
> installs and, overall, they seem to be okay (RH and Mandrake).

The key issue to me would be what your box admins like and know how
to support.  The above are important, but won't happen if the boxes
can't be supported.

Jon Leonard
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