by I have been nursing along two FBSD 8.x file servers for several years. A few years ago we de-emphasized commodity servers running FBSD in favor of NetApp filers but they were/are still needed for the labs that use them.
Recently, a third lab has decided to replace an old/failing Solaris 10 box with a new file server. They decided not to pay the premium for a FAS2220 and instead opted for commodity hardware from Silicon Mechanics. This means we will soon have a third FBSD system. Therefore, the de-emphasis has now changed to "support".
We like FBSD for this because it has a very good ZFS implementation. Running Linux for file servers has never been a success here and isn't going to be an option (besides, I do not trust the Linux ZFS implementation and won't for several more years). Solaris is not an option for fairly obvious reasons. This means the new server will be running FreeBSD.
The existing systems are running an OS that is pretty much at end of life. However, due to circumstances I don't want to go into right now they won't have a new OS installed on them any time soon. We'll keep patching as long as there are patches available.
The decision that needs to be made: install FBSD 8.4-STABLE on the new box so it is consistent and maintained along with the other two boxes or start a new line with 10.0 (yes, .0 is a known negative in this decision).
On the plus side for running 8.x – it's a known thing, easy to install, all the necessary in-house development is done, etc. The downside has already been noted as EOL approaches. Additional downside is that the conversion from pkg_* to pkgng isn't something I'd planned to tackle just yet (though I suspect that'll be an issue with 10.x as well). Also, if this box gets 8.4 installed it won't be going to 10.x any time soon for the same reason the others won't.
On the plus side for running 10.x is EOL is a long way off. The down side is we don't have any experience with that release in house and will need to quickly come up to speed on it since the new hardware will be here in a week or two and the lab that bought it want's it in service yesterday.
I've spent the last couple of days building a test box. Right now it has 8.4-STABLE on it and is stumbling over problems compiling nss_ldap. Once I get that ironed out (or if I give up on the ironing) I'll start evaluating 10.x vs our current tool set.