My personal opinion, unless you want (read need) the quick-gui setup or leave it in the hands of peopole that can't edit files or use a CLI to manage a system, use regular a FreeBSD release instead. Because it will probably save you a few headaches instead when dealing with the system.
PBI are generally built from FreeBSD ports or packages, I wouldn't recommended using them on a server that is
critical, unless there are people here who can vouch for how much trouble it is to maintain them (e.g. patches for the daemon and update via pbi). -- That however is just my personal opinion, for most tasks they should be fine, but if I was the one who had to go bald fixing all weekend with a boss breathing down my neck, I wouldn't rely on them.
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Originally Posted by bigbearomaha
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( there are those who are adamant about non gui servers consuming less resources, but that is another discussion.)
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Very wise choice of words, not that I would expect much flames from here these days.
You should explore
http://www.freebsd.org/ports and see if everything you need is there; if you're not familiar with FreeBSDs offerings.
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Originally Posted by bigbearomaha
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The primary intent of my curiosity is for NFS/SAMBA servers, FTP servers, web servers, mail servers, etc...
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There are various servers available. FreeBSD includes servers and clients for NFS, FTP, and the sendmail MTA. PC-BSD at least has Samba out of box as a client, and should be server ready for it. There are many more in ports, for simple usage using ftpd will do but it's easy to use something else.
As far as using PC-BSD as a server, I would offer N bits of advice:
Assuming the machines will be important (e.g. taking it offline for most of a day != ok). Have a test system with the same hardware if you can afford it, deploy updates there before they hit the main(s).
Choose how you will administer the system, e.g. in person or via remote. And through the GUI or through the CLI. Through the remote way, you probably want to look at SSH or SSH+ X|or|VNC.
If the person administering the system services regularly has no idea how to use them or can't be trusted to learn them (e.g. apachectl). PC-BSD has a nice interface for doing simple tasks such as starting/stopping/restarting/checking if running services but there is a catch! Only a few come out of the box and you've got to write the shell scripts needed to add them manually to the GUI (I've written about this for SSHFS setup). To do that, you can just look at an already setup service, and then figure out how to shoe-horn the services into it.
FreeBSD has a very good way of handling services through the
rc system, which as ports/pkg generally install the required scripts, is considerably _less_ work then adapting them to PC-BSDs GUI service manager. The only side effect, is using a root shell instead of a control panel applet + root login prompt (via kdesu). You will need to learn to use the RC system in the basic form, e.g. executing the rc.d scripts and editing rc.conf anyway you slice it though.
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Originally Posted by bigbearomaha
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Just stepping into the world of BSD and I am not sure if I should wait till the final release of PCBSD 7 in about sept. or try the current one now.
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If you are serious enough to put in the effort, try setting up a 1.5.1 box for testing as a server and maintain it. When PC-BSD 7 comes out, deal with the upgrades a few weeks after the release. If by the time you're done and everything works... If you still want to go for it, go for it. --> If you have the time you might do likewise with FreeBSD 7.0-Release and the forthcoming updates to 7.1-Release.
DISCLAIMER
I am not a professional user of FreeBSD or any other system: like wise my opinions are my own and do not reflect on the PC-BSD community (nor the wider *BSD community).
Hello, I am investigating PCBSD as a server
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