5.2 is stable enough trust me! I have it running a big mail/web server here and have been using it on my laptop since 5.0 came out.
Its our machines anyway! If we want 5.2 you must let us have it its just not fair.

Its got a lot of new things that make its uptime overall probably better then 4.x such as the new UFS2 filesystem, it does clever things like does a filesystem scan while the server is RUNNING..

With 4.x if theres a possiblity something is wrong it just sits there for ages during its bootup doing a file system scan. FreeBSD 5.x with UFS2 (which is default in 5.2) will boot up as normal and then do a file system scan while running, it will normally only stop and do a scan during bootup and not continue if it suspects something is really wrong.
Overall it means better up time.

Putting us on 4.x puts us in a bit of a hole because its pretty hard to upgrade to UFS2 from UFS1 once 4.x isn't supported any more, that might be a little while away but FreeBSD has been know to make unpredictable jumps and changes in what the FreeBSD choose to support.
Also one of the main things behind 5.x is the fact that it is so different from 4.x that its hard to truly upgrade from 4.x to 5.x (because of things like UFS2, and a bunch of other file system related things I dont want to go into)
We might find a lot of people with 4.9 wanting new things like OpenBSD's Packet filter and will try and upgrade their machine to 5.2 and fail leaving A LOT of pain suffering and misery. I am pretty sure probably over half (at least!) of the 4.x machines installed here will have owners trying to make the jump to 5.x sooner or later.

In FreeBSD 5.1 and 5.2 the historic BSD boot scripts in /etc have been removed, in favor of the new rc.d system imported from NetBSD, it was a big thing, NetBSD announced it all at one of those big Unixfest things.

Things like a single partition setup don't really bother me, you can't please everyone.

I could go on for ever but you get the picture.
The customer's always right!
Anyway I have to go, have to finish off some work thats going into a book on BSD for Orielly

Before you say anything about just upgrading via CVSUP etc please understand that 4.x only has the ability to run on the very old UFS1 filesystem, its important to have the newer UFS2 filesystem

If you want FreeBSD 5.2 whats stoppin' you... you have cvsup for such things.

think you will like these two books on the Orielly page

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/1886411743/

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/1886411999/

I did upgrade a local test box from 5.1 to 5.2 without issue, but this thread: http://forums.ev1servers.net/showthread.ph...25&pagenumber=2
made it sound much much more difficult to upgrade from 4.x to 5.x

You guys don't seem to understand much?
I REALLY REALLY REALLY want UFS2 filesystem.
why cant I just get a UFS2 5.2 install off the bat?
Its rather impossible to get UFS2 file system from 4.9 to upgrade to 5.2
You guys don't seem to understand that 4.x ONLY has UFS1
UFS Version 1
ok?

Fbsd 5.x has some great features and improvements over the 4.x tree but the fact remains that 4.9 is the latest ' stable' release, and not without reason. it's not only your choice what to run on your server, but also ev1's choice to provide you with something they believe is the best, stable and secure offer available. Providing something like 5.2 is a much bigger risk, especially when you're relatively new to offering BSD..

I agree that it's somewhat unfortunate that the initial offering from ev1 was just a bit to early to use ufs2 by default... on the other hand; the main improvement of ufs2 seems to be Lazy inode initialization, which will only be a big advantage when the server crashes and reboots... performancewise it doesn't really outperform ufs(1)...


on a slightly related note; Pair.com for example uses 4.8 on all their user servers...