[MUD-Dev] Preference for host OS

[brandon at roguetrader.com]

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:

I just switched from FreeBSD to Solaris 8 x86 for a few reasons.
Primarily, Solaris is more stable and polished than FreeBSD or Linux
with the features I want. These are specifically root device
mirroring, local firewalling and threading.  With Solaris, I have a
trivial to setup and easy to manage root device mirror package (Disk
Suite); I have a great commercial-grade firewall, for free
(Sunscreen Lite). The interface available with Sunscreen is far
superior to the pain and headaches available with any other
open-source firewall; which may share the same functionality.

And solaris has a more mature implementation of kernel and OS
threading and SMP (I'm running this on a dual P3/733).  What won me
over to Solaris x86 was when I fired up the rc5/distributed.net
client on a quad P2 server. I selected one task and four threads,
kicked it off and then watched the CPU utilization with mpstat and
other tools.  It went up equally and maintained a linear load across
ALL cpus.

Basically, I did it because Solaris is just generally a more mature
OS, primarily because it DOES have a marketing engine.  I still have
grief with instable device drivers and whatnot in Linux and FreeBSD.
Sure Solaris supports less x86 hardware, and in reality from an
admin point-of-view I like FreeBSD over Solaris; but the pragmatic
side one out (plus, Sunscreen is a very cool firewall).

-Brandon
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