Initially, Solaris worked great serving up a webpage, however, the fact that I did a whole install and the fact that solaris is not exactly speedy on older hardware made working with it a little painful. If unattended, the next time I accessed the machine it would take a few seconds to spin up before allowing a login or serving a webpage. The fact that I left mostly all of the daemons running didn’t help. Yea, I know I could have disabled them all, I just like started clean rather than having to clean up.

Enter FreeBSD. I decided to stay away from Linux also, short of a Gentoo install (which would be painfully slow to compile everything), it’s an extremely easy way to get a minimal install with the smallest amount of effort. That and I enjoy using different things, time to brush up on the BSD knowledge since it’s been a couple of years since I’ve used it. Anyhow, now the machine is running FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE with a pretty vanilla install. I set up Lighttpd, MySQL, PHP for a web service so I can teach Delilah PHP one of these days. I also set up ajaxterm so I can access a command-line from places where SSH is blocked completely *cough*work*cough* in the event of an emergency.

Overall, I’m liking it more than Solaris, it’s certainly a lot more snappy and much easier to get all the things I want using ports than trying to mess with doing a build from source on Solaris.

You can check out my extremely weaksauce main page here:

http://navi.eight7.org

Anyone have any suggestions for what else I should use it for? Let me know in the comments!