# FreeBSD vs Solaris usefulness



## TjPhysicist (Sep 23, 2013)

Yes, I know: "ANOTHER vs thread", but I have honestly not been able to find an up to date answer to this question. While most vs threads cover usability or features and so on, that's NOT what I am concerned about primarily.

Basically, here's the scenario; I've been using all sorts of Linuxes over the last decade or so, and have been dabbling a bit in FreeBSD for like a year. I am actually getting into system administration as a career, which is where this question comes from. 

My basic question is this: Which am I more likely to find useful to know, in terms of a career in UNIX/Linux administration? On the flip side of the coin; if I was in a position to CHOOSE the OS the company I work for uses (though I doubt this will happen at all), which would you say is easier to administer (if there IS such a thing) Solaris or FreeBSD (from a neutral stand point, i.e. for someone with equal knowledge and experience in either).


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## SirDice (Sep 23, 2013)

Solaris as an OS is pretty much dead. Oracle killed it. You will still find quite some older Solaris' boxes but I doubt anyone would, willingly, buy new. If you know enough of FreeBSD you will have no problems finding your way on Solaris, if you happen to cross paths with one.


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## zspider (Sep 23, 2013)

Someone knowledgeable I know told me a few years ago that he didn't consider Solaris to be relevant anymore, based on that go with FreeBSD. Oracle seems content to let Solaris go too, just look at the apathy towards the leaked source code.

If you are looking for open source Solaris there is OpenIndiana and OpenSXCE, but they're not going anywhere fast.


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## TjPhysicist (Sep 23, 2013)

Thanks for the input guys, I thought as much that this would be true (re: Solaris is dead). I've heard from people that I've had interviews with that most of them are switching to Linux. 

What about the flip side of that? How relevant is BSD in the industry? I've googled around and found a bunch of examples of BSD being use by top notch people, but no one I've talked to personally ever mentions it. Does anyone here have some experience regarding the relevance of BSD in the IT industry that they can share?


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## SirDice (Sep 23, 2013)

I've found that by knowing FreeBSD I can usually find my way around commercial UNIX systems like AIX and HP-UX quite easily. You may not find a lot of companies using FreeBSD but the experience will get you a long way on other systems.


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## _martin (Sep 23, 2013)

TjPhysicist said:
			
		

> I thought as much that this would be true (re: Solaris is dead). I've heard from people that I've had interviews with that most of them are switching to Linux.


Not true. Solaris is not dead. 

When it comes to switching to Linux topic: that's one sad story. Many companies are switching to Linux (from HPUX, AIX, Solaris) when it comes to saving money. That doesn't mean it's better solution .. it's only cheaper. Not to mention what nightmare is to support those systems (e.g. multipathing, mirroring, LVM, HA). 

It's more likely you'll have some sort of Linux-based infrastructure in a smaller company. So I'd say you should focus on Linux first. 

When it comes to Unix (HPUX, AIX, Solaris) - big companies are still using it, and no worries, will be using it for some time. There's also a good reason why. The best you can do is give a Solaris try and compare it with other OSes. You can run Solaris in e.g. VMware, so it's very easy to build your own small virtual data center. Make your own opinion on Solaris.


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## TjPhysicist (Sep 23, 2013)

SirDice said:
			
		

> I've found that by knowing FreeBSD I can usually find my way around commercial UNIX systems like AIX and HP-UX quite easily.


 More than how much knowing Linux would help anyway?


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## Remington (Sep 23, 2013)

I agree Solaris is pretty much dead after Oracle killed OpenSolaris project.  I installed Solaris OS three years ago and it's still running on my home computer as a file server using ZFS.  I might switch over to FreeBSD since ZFS has matured very well.

The are two things I liked about Solaris:

ZFS
Virtual Environment
Linux and FreeBSD are playing catch up with Solaris and will render Solaris worthless in the near future.  FreeBSD's ZFS has been forked from OpenSolaris' ZFS since we don't think Oracle will release additional ZFS code to the public so the FreeBSD community will develop its own ZFS version.

Oracle has Linux as well but it's also dead.

Oracle should stick to what they do best, which is Oracle Database.  Anything else they touch is pretty much dead.


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## SirDice (Sep 23, 2013)

TjPhysicist said:
			
		

> More than how much knowing Linux would help anyway?



Yes, I can't find my way around _any_ Linux distribution because they all seem to do things differently.


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## TjPhysicist (Sep 23, 2013)

SirDice said:
			
		

> Yes, I can't find my way around _any_ Linux distribution because they all seem to do things differently.


Yeah, *I* recently had the misfortune of doing my Red Hat certification along with my Linux+. So many configuration files in all different places. *shudder*.

I haven't used other UNIXes. How similar are they to FreeBSD, given that FreeBSD is very different from Linux (in terms of FHS, configuration files, where things are etc)?


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## SirDice (Sep 23, 2013)

TjPhysicist said:
			
		

> I haven't used other UNIXes how similar are they to FreeBSD. Given that FreeBSD is VERY different from Linux (in terms of FHS, config files, where things are etc).



Things on FreeBSD tend to be similar because we all have the same origins. Lots of stuff on FreeBSD is in places that are more or less traditional. The commercial UNIX systems usually use the same traditions. 

Besides that, getting things done on FreeBSD involves learning how it works. That same knowledge can then be applied to any system. On a lot of Linux distributions it usually works with a few mouse-clicks, you can get it running without knowing how it works. It's almost like Windows x(


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## TjPhysicist (Sep 23, 2013)

Thanks, I think that cleared up my questions/doubts. Plus *I* have a fetish for BSD style init, it's just infinitely better, and I think *BSD might be the only ones left to still have it among all the *nixes.


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## _martin (Sep 23, 2013)

@TjPhysicist It's worth mentioning that knowing FreeBSD doesn't give you much help with HP-UX. Systems may have the same roots, but administration of that system is very different. Even basic stuff like setting FS, creating users, doing backups, installing software is absolutely different. 

As @SirDice said though, FreeBSD is very organized and keeps things neat and in place (apposed to Linux distros doing the same thing differently). This is one of the strengths of FreeBSD too.


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## kpa (Sep 23, 2013)

Isn't HP-UX based on SysV UNIX rather than BSD?


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## _martin (Sep 23, 2013)

kpa said:
			
		

> Isn't HP-UX based on SYSV UNIX rather than BSD?



Yes, it is. But they both have been born in AT&T labs. Please correct me if I'm wrong.


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## throAU (Sep 24, 2013)

SirDice said:
			
		

> Solaris as an OS is pretty much dead. Oracle killed it. You will still find quite some older Solaris' boxes but I doubt anyone would, willingly, buy new. If you know enough of FreeBSD you will have no problems finding your way on Solaris, if you happen to cross paths with one.



Pretty much that, unless you're an Oracle customer and buying a complete solution from them (i.e., Solaris on Sparc plus Oracle database all under a support contract).

Solaris has some pretty cool technology (zones), but really unless you need it for a particular niche use, FreeBSD is under more active development and has a larger userbase.

And yeah, pretty much any commercial Unix has a lot more in common with FreeBSD than Linux does.  Switching between Linux and other Unix will feel a bit wierd.  Switching between FreeBSD and other Unix will be somewhat less wierd.  I've resurrected an AIX box without having touched one before due to basic familiarity from FreeBSD (I ended up having to fix the fstab file using only `cat` due to no editor being available ).

Also, on BSD style init - Slackware still uses it, last I checked.


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## _martin (Sep 24, 2013)

throAU said:
			
		

> I've resurrected an AIX box without having touched one before due to basic familiarity from FreeBSD (I ended up having to fix the fstab file using only `cat` due to no editor being available ).



I think AIX doesn't have fstab .

But I agree with what you said. Solaris has some killer features. And I'm personally very happy that FreeBSD is porting some of them to its sources.


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## ShelLuser (Sep 24, 2013)

TjPhysicist said:
			
		

> Yes, I know: "ANOTHER vs thread", but I have honestly not been able to find an up to date answer to this question. While most vs threads cover usability or features and so on, that's NOT what I am concerned about primarily.


So at first I kind of ignored the whole thread because, as you said yourself, "Yet another one...". But going over it I feel it needs a little more background, even though @SirDice basically said it all.

But there is a very good reason for it too, and it isn't solely an issue of Solaris being owned by Oracle either, though they are the major cause of it all.

The thing is; Oracle likes money. And basically prefer it over everything else to such extends that they'd rather get less frequent but bigger portions instead of smaller portions and optionally more frequent.

Sun Microsystems had several subscription models for their Solaris OS even though the OS itself was usable free of charge. What you basically paid for (apart from supporting an, in my opinion, awesome operating system and likewise company) was access to continuous updates. Now, this may sound weird at first; continue reading..  Solaris updates, just like the OS, were of course free too. But if you relied on the free part you'd also rely on a different distribution model, which basically pushed out an update package every once in a while. Usually every one or two months.

Note that this did not include security updates. Unlike Microsoft Sun has always realized their responsibility and as such have always provided security updates for free. Even dating back to Solaris 6 and 7 which you had to pay for (note: with "free" I'm not insinuating "easy to download" or "obtainable in an (end)user friendly manner").

Still, the free update model basically meant that you had to invest quite a bit of time to keep your system up to date. Compare it to the Ports system; if you update every week you'll have a lot less issues than if you update every month. The less frequent the update, the more ports which might require your attention and in general more work.

The commercial update on the other hand allowed access to continuous updates, but still heavily tested updates of course.

And the best part about their subscription model is that both big players as well as smaller ones (like myself) could all benefit.

Back in the days I used 4 Solaris servers and had an update subscription for 3 of them. Even though I could probably have chosen to keep 1 up to date and push the updates further down myself. I didn't bother because this was easier (took less time), I had the feeling I was supporting an awesome operating system and most of all: I could afford it.

So what was one of the first things Oracle did after the assimilation, corporate takeover? (I'll keep it professional ).

Simple; raising the prices for the Solaris subscriptions. Two to threefold.

Where I paid approximately E 180,- / per server per year I was now looking at something starting to tick around E 700,-. Worse yet: the provided services were also heavily cut short. Extra's like SunSolve access were all removed (SunSolve was a specific website which contained in-depth and technical information of just about every piece of hardware Sun had produced).

That was pretty much the beginning of the end for Solaris.

Sure; we still have OpenSolaris (project Indiana if I recall correctly).

First: don't get me wrong here, I heavily respect the project. I think it's commendable that some people feel so strongly about their preferred OS that they decide to take matters into their own hands.

But still...  Personally I never really liked OpenSolaris myself.

But the thing is: it seems that many people forget that Sun has spend a lot of company resources working on OpenSolaris. I don't think it'll be that easy to pick that up, something which in my opinion has proven itself in the last years when looking at the progress (or somewhat lack of) which has been made.

Not to mention the issue that companies have been bailing out of Solaris (and can you blame them?). And that is another important aspect: if you invested in moving away from Solaris then you'll need a lot more than merely looking at a situation where a sort of status quo of the previous situation is maintained before you'll even consider to move back again. I think it's safe to say that in general all the companies which moved on are gone for good.

So yeah, Solaris really is pretty much dead where commercial usage is concerned.

And from a company perspective I would be very reluctant to pick it up again myself, even though Solaris is my all time favourite Unix environment. Simply because, once again with all due respect, it has become a liability.

FreeBSD has been around almost as long as Unix itself existed (not entirely true, but you get the idea) and same can be said for Solaris as it was. Yet the OpenSolaris group basically still has to prove themselves. For all I know (from a commercial point of view) they could be gone next month. That makes it a liability, especially in comparison to Sun being out of the picture and the love/hate relationship with Oracle.



			
				TjPhysicist said:
			
		

> My basic question is this: Which am I more likely to find useful to know, in terms of a career in UNIX/Linux administration?


I think I answered the main question up there.

You'll still find Solaris around, but usually in enterprise environments where companies simply can't afford to "just" move on. Even so, I think it's very likely that many of them may have started a transition to move away already. So even if you do come across Solaris I wouldn't be surprised if the first thing you heard was that it was getting ready to be put into retirement.

Even though the question has already been answered I hope this still can shed some different light on the matter.

Edit: Null edit & fixed broken quote.


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## ShelLuser (Sep 24, 2013)

matoatlantis said:
			
		

> Not true. Solaris is not dead.


I think we'll have to agree to disagree on that 



			
				matoatlantis said:
			
		

> When it comes to Unix (HPUX, AIX, Solaris) - big companies are still using it, and no worries, will be using it for some time. There's also a good reason why.


Sure, but money concerns have always been an important factor, even for Enterprise like environments.

And although Oracle didn't simply started raising prices threefold for these kind of environments (not every time that is) they did start changing the terms and setting up new SLA's, usually also for different prices.

You should not underestimate the prices Oracle likes to charge for anything which falls outside their field of direct expertise. And even though most companies will heavily weigh in the risk factor (inevitable with migrations) and based on that decide to leave things, I can't help wonder if most haven't already decided to move on.


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## CoTones (Sep 25, 2013)

Little off topic, but dinosaurs so big and powerful, especially when compared to mammals, so talking about their extinction is pure nonsense, isn't?

Business _supports_ and business _kills_, as business see no value other than *money*. There was a time when professionals where generally even more skeptical about linux.


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## _martin (Sep 25, 2013)

ShelLuser said:
			
		

> I think we'll have to agree to disagree on that


So it seems ;-)



			
				ShelLuser said:
			
		

> Sure, but money concerns have always been an important factor, even for Enterprise like environments.



Very much true. And as you mentioned in your post above, support is very important. Especially for big enterprises. If I hit a bug which stops production (== losing a lot of money in a short time) I need a quick and reliable support and fix. 

I agree with you though, Oracle and SUN is like yin and yang.


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## _martin (Sep 25, 2013)

gpatrick said:
			
		

> The only reason Linux has its place in the corporate world is some stooge higher up in the company sees some other stooge at another company doing it, and that moron says it is saving them huge amounts of money.


Hear, hear!

You spoke my mind.

When I read your post it was like talking to my colleague - we hit the same bugs (RedHat, SuSE). Cherry on top was when multipathing was corrupting filesystems. Not to mention procedure to expand RAID1 md device with multipathing. That's like a bad joke ..


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## zspider (Sep 25, 2013)

matoatlantis said:
			
		

> Hear, hear!
> 
> You spoke my mind.
> 
> When I read your post it was like talking to my colleague - we hit the same bugs (RedHat, SuSE). Cherry on top was when multipathing was corrupting filesystems. Not to mention procedure to expand raid1 md device with multipathing. That's like a bad joke ..



It really frustrates me that the mess that is Linux (ducks) is more popular in business computing than the solid, time tested systems. When I had Linux it was always flaking out in weird ways. Not to say that it never ever happens on FreeBSD, but it's much much rarer.


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## CurlyTheStooge (Sep 26, 2013)

There's bit too much hatred for Linux in here. Just saying.

Regards.


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## Crivens (Sep 26, 2013)

CurlyTheStooge said:
			
		

> There's bit too much hatred for Linux in here. Just saying.
> 
> Regards.



Hatred? I don't think so. Or at least hope so. Dislike, with experience to back it up? More likely. The thing is that it is not so easy to hate "Linux" because you could as well try to nail fog to the wall. Linux, as the kernel, is not really a topic here I think. What the seperate distributions make of it? That is more of a target for bad vibrations. And that is what I see referenced here as points of dislike. What these distributions ship, and that they want money for nothing (and chicks for free?) when it comes to support. THAT is the problem, and I think we have a right to point that out. Don't you think?


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## CurlyTheStooge (Sep 26, 2013)

Crivens said:
			
		

> What these distributions ship, and that they want money for nothing (and chicks for free?) when it comes to support. THAT is the problem, and I think we have a right to point that out. Don't you think?



I should re-word it to RHEL support from Linux and I for one, somewhat do agree with that. I've worked with RedHat support guys in the recent past and yeah, a lot of times what we ended up with was frustration and resolved the issue ourselves.
However, I won't call them crap just because they won't support an older/unsupported version of some software that the admin installed and in the process screwed up the server. That's why they have SLA and terms & conditions.

Regards.


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## _martin (Sep 26, 2013)

gpatrick said:
			
		

> AIX has /etc/filesystems


Yop, that's why I was teasing @throAU a bit. 

@@CurlyTheStooge Not hate at all, just the experience with it. And crap does describe it very good. Especially compared to commercial UNIXes it tries to replace. When you read the posts above you can see it's not about older, unsupported software installed on the system (not at all). It's about the system itself (kernel) and utilities shipped with the sold distribution.


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## Remington (Sep 26, 2013)

CurlyTheStooge said:
			
		

> There's bit too much hatred for Linux in here. Just saying.
> 
> Regards.



I don't think anyone hates Linux.  The main problems with Linux are too many distros, binary repositories and they're disfranchised.  One application you install may work with Ubuntu but it may not work with Red Hat and it's nightmare to migrate to different Linux distro.  Upgrades are also a problem since there are different binary repositories as I experienced broken applications or OS from upgrades/updates.  Linux binary repositories are often outdated and unreliable due to different configuration settings during compile time.  One repos may have binary application but later they discontinue the support forcing you to seek updates elsewhere which also poses another problem with different configurations, dependencies, installation path, etc.

That's why I like FreeBSD better because FreeBSD's packages and ports are very well maintained with latest updates and organized.  This makes upgrades/updates relatively easy and stable too.  If something breaks in FreeBSD which is rare and its easy to fix.  Linux has too many problems and its a headache for system admins.

You have to remember that Linux is the kernel itself.  Linux distros build their own Linux OS with different applications, configurations, file directories, etc.


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## CurlyTheStooge (Sep 26, 2013)

Remington said:
			
		

> One repos may have binary application but later they discontinue the support forcing you to seek updates elsewhere which also poses another problem with different configurations, dependencies, installation path, etc.



I totally understand that, however when I said Linux, I meant the enterprise Linux distributions with support(as we are talking about the enterprise *nixes in the thread).
Now, while I agree on the support perspective, I somewhat disagree on the repos point. I've been using CentOS since last 3 years to emulate the work environment at home and the only time I messed up the repos was when I didn't read the documentation on configuring/adding extra repos. But again, I'm a Slackware user for a reason. 

But I understand that's not applicable to the playground distros like Fedora, Ubuntu etc. But reading the official documentation does help and is encouraged, whether any enterprise Linux or *BSD.



> Linux has too many problems and its a headache for system admins.


Again, too generic but I won't say its not entirely false.

I'm newbie enough to talk about FreeBSD administration so I won't. 

Regards.


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## zspider (Sep 26, 2013)

@CurlyTehStooge, well this is the FreeBSD forum and the Linux users post their hatred for *BSD all over the place, including at Phoronix, on a regular basis. It's usually based on irrational zealotry, whereas here there are good reasons for the "hate". 

My point is that people here have the right to discuss how they feel about Linux, within reason.

I also will go further to suggest that it's not hate if it's true.



			
				matoatlantis said:
			
		

> Not hate at all, just the experience with it. And crap does describe it very good. Especially compared to commercial UNIXes it tries to replace. When you read the posts above you can see it's not about older, unsupported software installed on the system (not at all). It's about the system itself (kernel) and utilities shipped with the sold distribution.



I identify with that.


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## Daisuke_Aramaki (Sep 28, 2013)

I am afraid I am not adding anything to further the discussion. But, I will tell you this. Last week, a recruiter from Google contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in talking to him about a possible engineering role at Google. He had seen my blog recently and thought my writings on *BSD was very relevant and that was the reason he wants to talk to me. *BSD will always have its place and will be of interest to a large number of companies. True, once in a while you would hear news reports about a certain OS phased out of a company and so on, but you never know.


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## throAU (Dec 18, 2013)

*Re:*



			
				gpatrick said:
			
		

> AIX has /etc/filesystems
> 
> ```
> /:
> ...



Ah, that's it.

It was about six years ago and my only ever time logging into an AIX box. Basically I fixed it at 5am on a weekend because the remote administrator back at HQ screwed up an edit on that file and prevented the machine from booting multi-user somehow.

Anyway... point being: if you've used a few different UNIX variants and something retarded like that happens to a production machine running another UNIX variant, you'll most likely be able to troubleshoot it.


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## vermaden (Dec 18, 2013)

*Re: Re:*



			
				throAU said:
			
		

> gpatrick said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



And also AIX is the only one that has the -p option for grep(1) (paragraph), useful (not only) for /etc/filesystems:


```
# grep -p /home /etc/filesystems 
/home:
        dev       = /dev/hd1
        vol       = "/home"
        mount     = true
        check     = true
        free      = false
        vfs       = jfs2
        log       = /dev/hd8
```


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## robspop (Jan 11, 2014)

To answer OP:

I work for a UK University. I would describe us as a medium size enterprise in computing resource terms. For many years we have run a Solaris system, and it was excellent, very reliable. However, the Solaris system is just about dead and I think will disappear completely in the next couple of years. There are several reasons for this, and I suspect they will apply in lots of other "medium size" companies.

The first is that the actual decisions are taken by what someone higher up this thread called "morons". I think that is rather kind, but I will stick with it. The morons don't understand things, so when companies like Microsoft come along and say "outsource your email to us and it will be better and cheaper because you won't need dedicated technical support" the morons think "great" and do it. The result of that one has been that our email service is now virtually unusable, with many of my colleagues setting up redirects to Gmail accounts. It's difficult to go backwards though because the technical support staff have now gone. We have bought into things like Google Docs and Alfresco Hub, both of which I hate, and both of which seem to be much more Windows (or maybe Linux) oriented than OS agnostic.

The second is that Oracle have really killed Solaris for organisations like ours. We used to get a reasonable discount as an educational institution. Oracle stopped that and also put up all the prices, so the difference for us was huge. The result is that we have dying servers no longer under support contracts, quite a big network of Sunray labs running an absolutely horrible Ubuntu desktop, and again tech support staff not being replaced if they leave.

There are other factors as well (the users don't help!) but they are probably the main ones.

The result of all of this is that we have labs running Windows on PCs that are rubbish in terms of reliability compared to the SPARC-based server systems we used to have. They are much less reliable to use and are on a 3-year rolling replacement cycle and overall probably cost far more than retaining Solaris might have done, but not in a way the morons can understand.

The other thing we have is Linux. There are lots of reasons why, but the two main ones are probably (a) the morons have at least heard of it, and (b) there are people around who feel they are competent to support it (I think many actually are not, but that's another story). None of these people have even heard of FreeBSD as far as I know. I have FreeBSD running on my laptop and, when nobody was looking, I replaced the approved Windows image on my desktop PC with FreeBSD - nobody has noticed and I haven't got into trouble yet. So, there are two FreeBSD systems where I work, out of several thousand machines. If there are any others, I have not encountered them.

As others have said, learning FreeBSD will stand you in good stead for finding your way around any other Unix system, but I think admin jobs specifically requiring any of the *BSDs will be relatively rare.

I'll end with a bit of prejudice: the downside to knowing your way around any other Unix system is that in many ways, Linux is not a Unix system. It's something that, from a user perspective at the command line, looks like Unix. But under the hood, as they say - wow, what a mess.


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## ShelLuser (Jan 11, 2014)

When re-reading this thread again (very cool post @robspop) something struck me.

Solaris, SunOS at first (or as some will argue 'underneath'), is a true Unix system. Linux and FreeBSD are not, they're Unix-like operating systems. Now, I know it's all mere politics and semantics because in the end it's a mere licensing issue. From personal experience I'd say it's more so for FreeBSD (or any of the other two main BSD distributions) than it is for Linux (because in the end Linux is but a kernel whereas BSD is a full operating system).

Having that out of the way I can't help wonder if it couldn't be beneficial for the FreeBSD group to obtain a certification. Please note; I didn't even bother to look this up myself yet, I'm merely sharing an idea. Obviously if a certification would cost thousands of dollars then I can easily see that this wouldn't be the best of investments, especially for a non-profit organisation. 

But I do think it might help (a bit) to put FreeBSD a little better on the map, or the BSD distributions in whole for that matter.

Because; what true Unix environments still exist today? Better yet: which one are as easily accessible or perhaps well known as Solaris is? Sure, there's AIX which has been mentioned before, but I don't think it'll run on common (x86 based) hardware (not claiming this to be a requirement).

Although I too question the true usefulness I can't help wonder if it wouldn't (or couldn't) give all BSD distributions an edge. When keeping the 'management morons' in mind (a term I don't fully agree with) what would sound better? A Unix-like environment which happens to be well known, or a real Unix environment which you can even manage to install yourself (I think anyone should be able to get FreeBSD running within VirtualBox for example)?

Food for thought?


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## scottro (Jan 11, 2014)

For what it's worth, while job-hunting this past Spring, in the metropolitan NYC area of the US, I probably saw more requests for AIX knowledge than for Solaris or FreeBSD.   However, even the FreeBSD shops with whom I spoke needed some Linux knowledge.  For better or worse, if seeking a sysadmin position, I think there are probably hundreds more Linux positions than anything else.  
As for like or dislike--I've often thought that it's more important to know the various applications that will run on a server than the O/S itself.  If a company needs an Apache administrator, and they're running RHEL6, and you know Apache inside and out on FreeBSD, but don't know RHEL6,  you're almost certainly going to be a better candidate than the RHEL6 master who has never worked with apache.  (Hrrm, should Apache have the file tags in this case?   Or, a ports tag with a version in the first mention, in conjunction with FreeBSD?  Meh, mods, if you think it should, I apologize, but I couldn't decide, and therefore, left off the tags and gave it an upper case A.)

TL;DR

If you're looking for the O/S that will make you more marketable, RHEL is probably the most widely requested, at least in the NYC area of the US.  Neither FreeBSD nor Solaris seem to be that popular in job requirements these days, but if you want to be a sysadmin, deep knowledge of either one will serve you well, in my less than humble opinion.


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## NewGuy (Jan 12, 2014)

I think it is unfortunate so much of this thread on Solaris vs FreeBSD got sidetracked bashing Linux distributions. The original post had an interesting question and I think it deserves some thought.

My own response is that, given the opportunity to learn either Solaris or FreeBSD, I highly recommend trying to use both. This thread is full of people saying they were used to FreeBSD and got confused when trying to use Linux distros. Or people who were accustomed to one Linux-based distro and got completely turned around when moving to another distribution. This is not a problem with Linux distros anymore than getting confused when moving between BSDs is a fault of the BSD-based operating systems. Rather it shows these people got stuck in habits, narrow ways of thinking and were not prepared to move out of their comfort zones.

When I was in school I learned Solaris in the classroom and ran Slackware at home. They were similar enough to feel familiar while having enough differences to keep me on my toes. And I'm glad I had that variety as one of my first jobs mixed Red Hat Linux and FreeBSD. Neither OS I had used in school, hardly even touched Red Hat before, but I was accustomed to slight variations in UNIX systems and so it was pretty easy to adapt to both Red Hat Linux and the FreeBSD systems. These days I tend to switch between FreeBSD, CentOS and Ubuntu, all pretty seamlessly as I do not allow myself to fall into habits, to stagnate using just one platform.

My advice is to maintain a variety in your operating systems. This thread is full of examples why forming habits and focusing on one OS is a bad idea.


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## vermaden (Jan 12, 2014)

*Re:*

@gpatrick,

Raw truth you say.

We also have 'pleasure' of using Red Hat support with cluster problems (NFS related and SCSI fencing related). There are two things that Red Hat support is good in. First are gathering the 'sos' reports and the second one is passing your bug/case to other time zone admin.

They did not solved anything, we solved the problem and then as we said to close these requests because we solved them they asked as what we did, because this may be helpful for them.

... and yes, we also stay away as far as possible from GFS/GFS2 shit.


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## throAU (Jan 14, 2014)

NewGuy said:
			
		

> I think it is unfortunate so much of this thread on Solaris vs FreeBSD got sidetracked bashing Linux distributions. The original post had an interesting question and I think it deserves some thought.


Bashing?  Hmm.  No.  Based on experience since 1995, I dislike the GNU toolchain primarily, the Linux kernel is actually decent.


> This thread is full of people saying they were used to FreeBSD and got confused when trying to use Linux distros. Or people who were accustomed to one Linux-based distro and got completely turned around when moving to another distribution. This is not a problem with Linux distros anymore than getting confused when moving between BSDs is a fault of the BSD-based operating systems. Rather it shows these people got stuck in habits, narrow ways of thinking and were not prepared to move out of their comfort zones.


Again, not so much.  The thing is that Linux in general tends to go out of its way to break compatibility with the rest of the Unix world.  FreeBSD and Solaris, OS X, AIX, etc. are all a lot more familiar to one another than GNU/Linux (its the GNU bit which causes this) as far as command line parameters go, man pages (info?  get out), go, etc.


> My advice is to maintain a variety in your operating systems. This thread is full of examples why forming habits and focusing on one OS is a bad idea.


Sound advice.  Just realise that a lot of the dislike for Linux on here isn't just having a whinge, it is based on real world experience, and dealing with Linux being different for the sake of being different.  Different to fix things that are broken is one thing - reinventing the wheel and being different for the sake of it is entirely another.

With regards to your experience with slackware - slackware is in fact the least annoying of all Linux distributions because Patrick seems to "get" the Unix way, and doesn't stray too far from it.  The GNU tools still suck in various (incompatibility mostly) ways though.

Also, to make my stance clear:  I started out on Linux and later got exposed to Solaris, then FreeBSD... so my dis-taste for Linux isn't just because it's different and I don't want to learn.  It was the first *NIX I started out with.


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## ShelLuser (Jan 14, 2014)

NewGuy said:
			
		

> This thread is full of people saying they were used to FreeBSD and got confused when trying to use Linux distros. Or people who were accustomed to one Linux-based distro and got completely turned around when moving to another distribution. This is not a problem with Linux distros anymore than getting confused when moving between BSDs is a fault of the BSD-based operating systems.


But it is a problem with the distribution. @throAU already summed up most of it but I'd like to pick that up and present a specific but simple example; configuring software which is also available on several platforms (think Solaris, *BSD, Linux, etc.) and which is well documented by itself.

On a lot of Linux distributions the official documentation will most likely not fully apply because the distribution has chosen to do things differently. Either by differentiating on specific (but sometimes minor) details like breaking up a configuration file in dozen snippets while also making sure that those snippets don't follow the already present separation in the original configuration file, right down to actually changing the default behaviour of said software for the sole purpose of making it "fit in" with the distribution itself. Ergo: if you're not fully familiar with the distribution you won't easily grasp the underlying philosophy thus you'll have a hard time configuring that particular software.

Even though you may be fluent with it on other environments.

Now, I know I'm presenting extreme examples here, but think about SuSE versus CentOS (or RHEL for that matter). The first will often overrule any changes you make to the configuration files itself because you'll have to use its own setup tools, the latter is a good example of changing things for the sake of making it "blend in" (like cutting up a configuration file).

Those are issues which can be fully traced back to the distribution, not so much the software we're dealing with.

So yeah, I don't hate Linux either (I started with Solaris then used Linux (RedHat 'Picasso') to keep my Unix experiences fresh), but I'm also not too impressed with the differences between all the distributions out there.


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