[ale] RedHat Enterprise vs. FreeBSD

[fd0man™—The Magical Floppy Man]

On Wed, 2006-08-16 at 13:51 -0400, Eichler, Paula J. (CDC/OCOO/ITSO)
wrote:

> Can anyone point me to any comparison documentation on RedHat
> Enterprise and FreeBSD?  Firsthand experience is relevant, as well.
> Specifically, I am interested in the advantage either one has over the
> other in installation, maintenance/patch management and ease of
> hardening.  Thanks ..pj
> 

I have no first-hand experience with RHEL, however, I do have experience
with FreeBSD and Linux in general, in many forms.  The best advantage
that I can say for FreeBSD is the easy to use file system snapshots
functionality, which eases the back-up process, providing on-line
backups for UFS2 file systems in any arrangement, and is even integrated
with the ?dump? utility.  Linux supports file system snapshots as best
as I can tell for the XFS file system, but only if LVM is used.  I have
never used a system with LVM on it, nor the XFS file system, so somebody
else would be better equipped to tell you more about that.

Other than that, FreeBSD is about as easy to install as Slackware or
older versions of Red Hat, and after it is set up is not that hard to
get up and running.  There are many ways to harden the system, including
OPIE (One-time Passwords In Everything), and various IP filtering
capabilities are available.  It is a well thought out system, and has
excellent reference documentation that is available for the current
releases.

Not to sound like Linux is bad?it is far from it.  However, I have found
that I rather like FreeBSD if I need to set up a server very quickly for
someone and it needs to be reliable, secure, and easy for them to
administer.  Of course, your mileage may vary.  However, I think that
the very easy to set-up and use filesystem snapshots are an invaluable
thing to have, and they are the reason that I have chosen FreeBSD over
Linux for production servers.

    ? Mike

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