[nycbug-talk] [OT] FreeBSD 5.4 crashing?

[Matt Juszczak]

Hi all,

The past two weeks have been rough for me.  I've had our production mail 
server, FreeBSD 5.4, and our back end LDAP servers crashing.  I've tried 
everything, from upgrading to 5.4-STABLE, and now switching from IPF to PF 
(which actually has made them not crash).

Problem is, even if these boxes now stay up for a month, I don't know if I 
can trust my FreeBSD 5.4 boxes and sleep well at night (at least not 
these).  I think in order to satisfy my boss as well (he wants to switch 
to Debian which I'm struggling to aim away from for a high traffic mail 
server), I need to switch OS's to something that I know will be stable so 
we can get our new LDAP implementation in place and I can move on to other 
projects.....

My debate right now is FreeBSD 4.11 or OpenBSD 3.7.  As an avid and long 
time FreeBSD user, my recent install of OpenBSD seemed to go smoothly. 
Problem is, we use adaptec raid, and OpenBSD recently lost support for 
that, but apparently a simple kernel rebuild can do the trick.  Also, 
people have told me that, although the SMP code is more stable on OpenBSD 
(some responses have told me that the reason my FreeBSD installs seem to 
keep kernel trapping HARD (they lock up) is because of unstable SMP code 
in 5.x), it isn't used as efficiently.

Therefore .... what do you all think?  Our setup, to recap, is like this:

Orion ---> Mail server, dual 3.06 ghz xeon, 4 GB DDR 2100 Kingston, LDAP.
Uranus --> LDAP server, dual 850 MHZ PIII, 2 GB DDR, regular PAM.
Caliban -> LDAP server, dual 850 MHZ PIII, 2 GB DDR, regular PAM.

Thanks :)

-Matt