>>> On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 7:24 PM, in message <49596A48.4000104 at bradbury.edu.hk>, Christopher Chan <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote: >> I agree in general with most every opinion. Especially Davide's comment > above. Very good analogy >> Open Solaris may be your best choice. >> I would suggest you do pay attention to Solaris itself. It's free (as in > beer) from Sun & it works. > > Except for patches unless you want to browse Sun's website regularly to > download them. > > You also get more hardware support on OpenSolaris and support from Sun > for OpenSolaris but I suppose the latter option is probably better done > with Solaris 10 + support which includes access to patch management. > Unless you like the way things are done over here in Linux land which is > one tool to manage them all and not one tool to install packages and > another tool to install patches to packages. Agreed. Only the OP knows the criticality of his data & whether or not he needs support & at what level. The root answer is that if he wants to use ZFS (which is a *good* choice) he should use some flavor of Solaris Tony Placilla <aplacilla at jhu.edu> Sr. UNIX Systems Administrator The Sheridan Libraries Johns Hopkins University