Good lord, FreeBSD 4.9 is a piece of crap.
Reliability? Well, yes, if your measure of reliability is how many more times per day that the system will crash out than Microsoft Windows 95. All I have to do is put in a CD that's got either a data track or has a scratch and the stupid system will hammer itself to death in fairly quick order trying to deal with the scsi transport errors. It certainly looks like even though FreeBSD may be the bees knees for reliability and performance if you have perfect hardware, you're risking death and dismemberment if you even walk near it with media that isn't a bit-by-bit image of the glory of G-d (I'll not even start to discuss vinum, because when I think about that product of the programmers art my vision starts to blur red and I start feeling like I really need to start taking bites out of my shield.)
I've got R*dh*t 8 sitting at home (a copy for work, which is having its own set of troubles with free software; but 3600 users running Pick on a 4x P4 box with 8gb of memory is a rather different kettle of fish than a single-user box attached to a bank of CD drives) and I can always try to upgrade the existing FreeBSD installation from 4.9 to 4.10 (but I'll probably just replace the disk with a bigger one and do a fresh install across the net), but either way the 8 crashes (each ending up with the stupid machine wanting human intervention because the crash made / vomit all over itself) in the last 16 hours means 4.9 delenta est!