FreeBSD production server
 

if i wanted to setup a FreeBSD production server, which version would you suggest? i read some articles talking about how 5.3 isn't production-ready yet.. i don't know much about BSD, so any information would be extremely helpful!

Assuming it's a SMP system, 5.3

Go for 4.11 version. But if it is SMP then you need to got for 5.3 series as pointed by sigsegv
May be this clear more http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...ticles/releng/

Since it doesn't really address the question, I doubt it.

Zoso -- Here's the reason that I said what I did.

The 4.XX series has been around a *long* time now (March of 2000), and is considered by most, myself included, to be very "tried and true". It's missing a good bit of "improvements" that are in 5.3 though, as backporting them would be very ugly (or impossible due to major upheaval). It's also (in my experience) faster than 5.x on a uni-processor system.

The 5.X series has a good bit of redesign in the guts of the kernel. It's considered by many to be an improvement over the design of 4.X. It's the faster of the two on SMP systems, largely due to the guts changes. It's not unstable as the articles you mention may have said, and in my experience has been completely rock solid. I have several production systems running 5.3. 4.xx will eventually be an old codebase that they don't make patches for anymore (like 3.x is now), so if you're looking to stay with a single CVS branch for years, 5.x is for sure the way to go.

Not everyone thinks 5.X is good though, and in fact, the direction that 5.X was (is) headed is the whole reason that Matt Dillon started DragonFlyBSD which is what I would actually like to recommend, but the package subsystem is kind of a mess still.

I hope this makes your decision easier.

thanks! i've read the article, and i think i'll take your suggestion and go with DragonFlyBSD, sigsegv. the reason i ask is because a friend asked me to set it up for him using some form of bsd. i told him i wasn't comfortable with it, but he wanted me to do it anyway. again, thanks.. :-)