By virtue of our IT person announcing that he is leaving EDS, my responsibilities are expanding. While I have prior experience with systems administration, and I have been dabbling in that space while at EDS, I think I'm actually going to have to get more serious about it now.
To get myself acquainted with a Dell PowerEdge 1750 server that we have, I decided to install FreeBSD on it. Seeing as how I haven't been on the "bleeding edge" of FreeBSD for quite awhile now (my home machine is still on FreeBSD 4.10+), I decided to give FreeBSD 6.0 Beta 4 a whirl.
I'm pleased to say that so far, it has been great. The install was a snap (well, mostly because they are still using sysinstall, which I have used many times in the past). All of the server hardware was automatically detected, including the Ethernet adapter, the built-in LSI SCSI Raid, and the dual Xeon processors. In fact, it appears as if SMP is finally enabled in the generic kernel, so I didn't have to re-compile in order to enable the second CPU (that's hot).
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll be able to roll FreeBSD into production -- nobody else on my team has ever touched FreeBSD, and I'm not getting the "eagerness to learn" vibe. So, my options are either Solaris/x86 or Linux, and I think I'm going to take the Solaris/x86 route. But, in the meantime, I'm going to try and play with the new FreeBSD as much as I can. When 6.0 ships, I'm going to have to take a serious look at making the jump on my home server.
-Andy.