I currently run an OpenSolaris (b134) server at home for share media between a few computers (all Macs at the moment). I use ZFS to mirror a couple of disks and have a couple of SMF manifests.
My background is as a user of OS X and as a user of (Open)Solaris with formal training in administering Solaris 10 and Solaris 10 Internals.
I have two issues with OpenSolaris at this time, there is an amount of uncertainty in the OpenSolaris camp at the minute and I'm having terrible trouble getting some Perl stuff to work.
I'm looking at BSD to possibly replace OpenSolaris but I'm unsure as to what BSD OS to choose. FreeBSD looks like an initial good choice, but I'd really like some input from people who use BSD every day.
I've been using FreeBSD for about 10 years now -- starting with an install of 4.0 on my laptop. Prior to that I did most of my work on Sun O/S (pre Solaris and Solaris) systems and had no problem making the switch. At the office, FreeBSD is the preferred O/S for our clusters. We do have some boxes that run Linux or Solaris, but in the last 10 years we've had better success with our BSD systems.
FreeBSD is straight forward to install, and the ports collection makes it fairly easy to install the support software that you need.
The only heartburn we've had with FreeBSD is the lack of hardware support for some 'odd' devices, and we currently have a set of (older) motherboards that seem not to be compatible with anything after BSD 6.3. Unfortunately I cannot offer any details on these hardware issues as I'm not directly involved with this project and only know that the sysadmins ran into this glitch.
Using FreeBSD as a workstation has been great. Flash has always been a nagging problem under BSD; offset somewhat by being able to use the Linux flash player in a "compatibility" mode, but flash has always been a pain for me under BSD.
Would I recommend FreeBSD to a friend? Absolutely, especially for 'lights out' operations like it sounds you'll be using it for.
Hardware shouldn't be an issue, I'm running a C2D on a fairly generic motherboard and four SATA drives.
Again, Flash shouldn't be a problem either, I generally don't use any GUI based stuff on the system at the moment, only the occasional streaming X over SSH because I don't know the commands to do something or other.
I'll try and virtualise FreeBSD for a bit, my main concern is support for the current ZFS zpools I have.
The future of OpenSolaris looks highly uncertain at present, indeed. Among the BSD distributions, FreeBSD is the general purpose distribution, and the rest are special distributions for users with specific demands. It seems you will benefit most from FreeBSD given its wide userbase. We never have had any hardware issues with FreeBSD, but perhaps it is good to mention that we are not experienced in setting up wireless connections, which may be a requirement. Sometimes there is some unexpected behavior in automounting usb drives.
Wireless shouldn't be a problem, all of my networking is done through an on-board gigabit NIC and and a quad-gigabit PCI card, and USB shouldn't be a problem either, if I need any media on USB I usually stick the USB drive in my Mac and pull the content over NFS (easier than fiddling around under the desk trying to open the server case).
One lasting question I do have, I've got a couple of Sun training manuals for administering Solaris, is there anything similar for FreeBSD? I know there is the handbook, but thought that might be more of a reference as apposed to a howto/training manual...
My main concern is management of resources like disks, networks, processes and services as I'd have thought they'd be different to Solaris...
I bought "FreeBSD Unleashed" a while back; it is more of a comprehensive text than a reference, so probably not what you are looking for. I tend to use the manual at freebsd.org for most of my info these days as it is probably the most current.
