Was a little fuzzy on a few things I read in these forums about installing FreeBSD. First of all I'm aware that SM doesn't provide as much support as far as updates go (compared to Red Hat). But I also read somewhere they apps such as Apache and MySQL arn't installed for you. So that it's just a install right from CD with no configuring at all. Is this true?

I believe that would be true since Redhat is like that when you just ask for plain Redhat installation. If you are going for FreeBSD, you would need to know how to install what is not there and to handle the kernel updates yourself.

I asked for 5.1, and for Plesk to be installed. So if Plesk is to be installed it would be pretty hard to NOT have apache or something installed already, though I'm not too sure.

Ah yes, with Plesk you should have Apache and all that installed. They are added by the control panel.

I did not know that FreeBSD 5.1 was being offered, I thought it was just FreeBSD 4.9 on the order form.

I know they offer it as an OS REload, 5.1 isn't a "production" release so that could be why.

You can request 5.1 with a new server, but yeah it isn't listed in the options. To my knowledge they are not offering a 5.2 or 5.2.1 install. It looks like 5.3 may be delayed again slightly, but it's release should be coming up soon. Last I heard they were still planning on going stable with 5.3.

I'd highly recommend doing an upgrade to 5.2.1 as soon as you can. However, I'm not sure how badly plesk or other control panels mangle userland and an upgrade to 5.2.1 may very well break your control panel.

I'm thinking about doing an upgrade from 4.9 to 5.2.1 here pretty soon. It's just a LOT of work (especially when you have to upgrade all your jails too) and I'm lazy.

UD.

I just want to add that if you ask, they'll install 5.2.1 with the partition setup that you need. Great job for $25.

(5.2.1 RELEASE, not the latest patched version)

Just request it when you order a server and they install it for you. 5.2.1 that is.