iServer Migrating to FreeBSD

Scott Brady writes "In an announcement to customers November 11, Virtual Server provider iServer announced plans to migrate from BSDi to the more open FreeBSD on ''...[n]ew Virtual Server accounts provisioned after November 23, 1999". They went on to say that "...we anticipate that all Virtual Servers will eventually be migrated to the new FreeBSD Virtual Server platform.'' Look for an official announcement to be forthcoming. "

mmmmkay

[dennisp]

Okay, who are these people? :)

Anyway, I don't see why there is a reason to stay with BSDi except for better driver support for certain raid hardware. FreeBSD 3.3 is far better than BSDi 4.0.1.

We have 4 BSDi boxes where I work, but we bought them in 98 when 2.2.8 was the current stable version and there weren't enough drivers for what we needed. FreeBSD has grown at a couple of orders of magnitude faster than BSDi has in the past year. I of course will still be interested when BSDi announces 5.x (if they do).

The fact that BSDi is also closed source hurts it a lot. You can't tweak the system to the nth degree like FreeBSD unless you buy an expensive source license.

It's always nice to hear a company actually announce that they are switching to FreeBSD. Most are quiet about doing such things. There are probably a ton of high profile companies using *BSD for various purposes but they don't announce it.
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So far, only old news

[Mithy]

The only thing I could find on the website about migration to FreeBSD was this snippet [iserver.com], dated September 30:

'Any UNIX Dedicated Servers ordered after Sunday October 3 will be set up and configured in our new data center in Vienna, VA instead of Orem, UT and will run FreeBSD 3.2 instead of BSDi Unix. The core software services (Apache, FTP, POP, IMAP, SMTP) will be available as before. However, some of the "contrib" software has not yet been ported to the FreeBSD platform. We expect to have the full complement of contrib software ported to FreeBSD in the very near future.'

So it looks like it's been a part of their ongoing strategy for a little while. Good to see FreeBSD get one over on the closed-source competition, though. :)

--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."

Re:So far, only old news

[kkenn]

It's online now..this is a cool thing!

-K.

What's with the little 'i'?

[cmc]

It's "BSDI". Why are people calling it "BSDi"? What's with the little "i"?

Guess who used to work for iServer

[heroine]

I know someone who used to work for them back when they were one of the first virtual hosting providers. Hard to believe they stuck with BSDi as long as they did, when the amount of competition in that business has gone from 0 to infinity. Hopefully the Utah weather hasn't gotten any worse than it already was.

1st December

[D.A.Alderud]

1st December