[ale] Linux or *BSD for Samba

[Jeff Hubbs]

Vernard -

Thanks for not thinking this as merely trolling; this is one instance where
I felt that even though I have no BSD mojo I ought to at least consider it.
>From what you're saying, it seems as though Linux' NFS is good enough that I
needn't pursue *BSD, at least not specifically for this (but I probably
should anyway).

In this case, one of my co-workers is trying to get 10GB-300GB of file space
available to his tiny-drived RS/6000; I think he's trying to put a DB2 data
set on there.

- Jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: Vernard Martin [mailto:vernard at cc.gatech.edu]
To: ale at ale.org
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 11:11 AM
To: Jeff Hubbs
Cc: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Linux or *BSD for Samba


> I know there are some BSD+Linux folk around, so I feel comfortable
> posing the question here:  given a need to create an NFS server, is BSD
> or Linux (2.4 kernel) a better choice?  I have heard for a long time
> that Linux' NFS is "iffy;" I have messed with it only a little with some
> joy, but I really want NO ISSUES exporting to AIX or Linux clients.

Usually asking if one particular OS is better than another OS is considered
a
troll but since your question seems sincere, I will try my best to answer
it.

In the past, Pre 2.2 kernels, NFS under linux had abysmal performance. I
mean
_really_ and truly horrible performance. Much effort was put into
determining
exactly what the problem was and how to fix it. As of the late 2.2 kernels
and
the 2.4 kernels, the performance is reasoanble if not actually exceptional.
Howver, its very difficult to get over the stigma of horrible performance
from
years ago.

BSD is actually several OSes and not just one. The three big contenders are
NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. And when someone says that BSD is better than
X,
you should always ask which version they are using. Kinda like when folks
rever
to linux but are thinking of the 2.2 kernel rather than the 2.4 kernel.
Anyway,
FreeBSD and NetBSD have had a long record of having exceptional performance
with respect to network related activities such as serving as an FTPserver,
NFS
server, email server, etc. And I seem to recall that a NetBSD box holds the
record for most bandwidth served in one day (the ftp.cdrom.com machine
served
over a terabyte of data one day or soemthing in that range). And it is
uniformly accepted that NetBSD will give you better performance than a Linux
system using pretty much the same hardware.

Now, the tricky part: the difference in performance is going to be based on
several factors and may not big enough to make it really that relevant. If
you
are just serving user files to a half dozen windows machines over samba then
I
think you really won't notice the difference. If you are tryign to run a
high
bandwidth webserver than you are going to really notice the difference.
Maintenacne of a BSD machines requires a bit more knowledge of unix systems
than a linux distro using a package management system. Also, familiarity
with a
system will usually override any perceived gain in performance. 

hope this helps

Vernard
-- 
Vernard Martin (vernard at cc.gatech.edu) http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~vernard/

        "Anything worth fighting over is worth fighting dirty over"
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