| Because FreeBSD comes with compilers for multiple programming languages, what you can do with FreeBSD is limited only by your imagination and the technical capabilities of your hardware. Various organizations are using FreeBSD for everything from low-end file sharing on old 486-class machines to creating high-end special effects and computergenerated animation rendering. Note The special effects for the Warner Brothers motion picture The Matrix were rendered on a powerful cluster of multiprocessor FreeBSD systems.
The following list provides some of the more common uses for FreeBSD that don't require any programming skill or custom software: File and print sharing The freely available Samba software (covered in Chapter 34, "File and Print Sharing with Microsoft Windows") allows file and print sharing with Windows-based computers. Using Samba, FreeBSD can even serve as a primary domain controller (PDC) for a Windows network. Web serving As mentioned previously, FreeBSD powers some of the busiest websites in the world. Even if you aren't setting up a website for the Internet, FreeBSD can make a great intranet server for your business. The wildly popular Apache server software, which is developed for compatibility with almost every platform in the world, is primarily written with FreeBSD as its reference platform. Email services You can set up an email server for your company with everything from encrypted IMAP access to sophisticated spam control, or even a web-based mail access system with calendaring. Routing, DNS services, and Internet sharing You can turn even a low-end Pentium into a very serviceable router, DNS server, or a gateway for sharing a single Internet connection with multiple computers. Database solutions Using FreeBSD and one of the several freely available SQL databases for it, you can create a database solution whose commercial equivalent could easily cost tens of thousands of dollars to implement. If the freely available databases don't have enough horsepower for your needs, you can run the Linux version of Oracle (or its free version, Oracle Express) on FreeBSD because FreeBSD can run most Linux applications as well as (and sometimes even better than) Linux itself. Adding a relational database back-end (as described in Chapter 29, "Configuring a Database Server") to your Apache server gives you a web hosting capacity to rival the best dedicated solutions from other vendors. Custom solutions FreeBSD has a very liberal license agreement that allows you to use its code in other applications free of royalties. This makes it a perfect solution if you are an embedded systems designer or a developer for one of the many projects that use code from the FreeBSD project, such as Apple's Mac OS X.
Any one of these individual tasks might seem like a small reason to consider FreeBSD, and in fact might seem better suited to a different operating system more dedicated to that particular task. However, the real strength in FreeBSD, bolstered by its open-source nature, is that it can do all these things at once. Need a machine to be a Windows domain controller, and also to act as an AppleShare file server and an NFS repository, all while serving a CGI-based website interface with an SQL database back-end? You could buy a Windows server, a Mac OS X server, and a Linux server to handle all these tasks, and spend months linking them all seamlessly together...or you could just use a single FreeBSD machine and do it all in one package. |
