Unix Consulting
I was a member of the Santa Cruz Operation Unix engineering group for four years, and I use it extensively in my business. I'm a Unix enthusiast! Here are a few notes on my experience with OpenBSD, FreeBSD, SCO Unix, Solaris, RedHat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu.
OpenBSD is a security-oriented operating system that's my primary choice for firewalls and small servers connected directly to the Internet. Its simple design and minimalist default configuration make it possible to deploy a secure server quickly.
Due to its fledgling, small-scale SMP implementation and relatively poor performance while running as a guest under VMware ESX Server, it's not something I'd recommend for high-volume or performance-oriented application or file servers.
This Web server's running OpenBSD/sparc64.
FreeBSD is a full-featured, high performance Unix operating system that's ideal for large application and file servers. Its performance as a guest in the VMware ESX Server virtualization environment is superb.
FreeBSD has a very strong SMP implementation as of release 7, so it takes effective advantage of large numbers of CPU cores.
I use FreeBSD/amd64 on both my main workstation (a Sun Ultra 20), and on my file server (a custom-integrated Supermicro server running the VMware ESXi hypervisor). I also used FreeBSD extensively for BIND, DHCP and NFS interoperability testing at The Santa Cruz Operation.
The Santa Cruz Operation developed and sold several Unix operating systems, including OpenServer and UnixWare. Although these are obsolescent today, they're still in use in many businesses, including Costco Wholesale, McDonald's, and BMW.
I was a member of The Santa Cruz Operation Engineering QA group (later Caldera and The SCO Group) for four years. During that time, I wrote some interesting QA software that found serious bugs in their pre-release Unix products. I have a huge amount of hands-on experience with these operating systems.
OpenServer and UnixWare aren't typically being deployed on new servers today, but there are still a large number of installed servers that have occasional problems. I'd be happy to help you maintain or migrate from an existing OpenServer or UnixWare server!
Solaris is a Unix operating system developed and sold by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). It runs on both proprietary Sun hardware and standard PC servers.
Solaris tends to work better than any other operating system on Sun's UltraSPARC workstations and servers. I implemented an Internet router and firewall for a customer's network using a Sun Fire V100 server, Solaris, and the SunScreen firewall software. It has been running completely free of problems, with very little maintenance for over six years!
Solaris also performs extremely well on servers with many CPU cores, and as a guest under VMware ESX Server. I did an NFS server benchmark test several years ago comparing various guests under VMware ESX Server, and Solaris 10 was the performance winner by far! FreeBSD 7 was in second place.
Ubuntu is the most user-friendly Linux distribution, with features that make installing patches and applications very easy.
One of my customers wanted her Lenovo Thinkpad configured to require less ongoing maintenance than it would have while using Windows Vista, which it came bundled with. Using a combination of Ubuntu and the VMware Player free desktop virtualization product, I supplied a laptop that had the ability to run Windows and Windows applications, while being based on a relatively low-maintenance operating system.
To her surprise, the applications included with Ubuntu were so comprehensive, and she found Ubuntu so easy to use, that she has rarely needed to use VMware Player and Windows at all!
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a popular commercial Linux distribution that supports an extremely wide range of applications. Since a modified version of it is used to implement the VMware ESX Server service console, I learned my way around it during my time in VMware engineering.