Slashdot Mirror

or the file itself:
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub /idgames/idstuff/source/q1source.zip

or the file itself:
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub /idgames/idstuff/source/q1source.zip

ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/sou rce/q1source.zip ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgam es/idstuff/source/q1source.zip ftp.3 dgamers.com/pub/3daction/00archives/quake/unsuppor ted/q1source.zip ftp2 .3dgamers.com/pub/3daction/00archives/quake/unsupp orted/q1source.zip

The Complete FreeBSD Manual which flat out contains everything you need or want to know about BSD

New FreeBSD Sub.with 3.4. This will not just get you the brand new 3.4 release for the super-low price of $24.95, but will enroll you in the FreeBSD subscription program, where you'll get a new version of the disc automatically at the discounted subscription rate.

For the subscription, they bill your credit card automatically when the new version ships (credit cards are the only payment method possible for our subscriptions). The normal shipping charge applies. You may cancel at any time, just write, call, fax, or email. FYI, there are approximately four releases of FreeBSD a year, so it'll cost you approximately $100/yr. But you're supporting great, freely available software development... and a kickass OS! :)

---------
Question: How do I leverage the power of the internet?

The Complete FreeBSD Manual which flat out contains everything you need or want to know about BSD

New FreeBSD Sub.with 3.4. This will not just get you the brand new 3.4 release for the super-low price of $24.95, but will enroll you in the FreeBSD subscription program, where you'll get a new version of the disc automatically at the discounted subscription rate.

For the subscription, they bill your credit card automatically when the new version ships (credit cards are the only payment method possible for our subscriptions). The normal shipping charge applies. You may cancel at any time, just write, call, fax, or email. FYI, there are approximately four releases of FreeBSD a year, so it'll cost you approximately $100/yr. But you're supporting great, freely available software development... and a kickass OS! :)

---------
Question: How do I leverage the power of the internet?

The Complete FreeBSD Manual which flat out contains everything you need or want to know about BSD

New FreeBSD Sub.with 3.4. This will not just get you the brand new 3.4 release for the super-low price of $24.95, but will enroll you in the FreeBSD subscription program, where you'll get a new version of the disc automatically at the discounted subscription rate.

For the subscription, they bill your credit card automatically when the new version ships (credit cards are the only payment method possible for our subscriptions). The normal shipping charge applies. You may cancel at any time, just write, call, fax, or email. FYI, there are approximately four releases of FreeBSD a year, so it'll cost you approximately $100/yr. But you're supporting great, freely available software development... and a kickass OS! :)

---------
Question: How do I leverage the power of the internet?

hornet.org is slashdotted, try: ftp.cdrom.com - pal

That's simply the download format. You can unzip the PC .exe file. The extracted files include a Javascript based html page plus some graphics. Works for me. All the apparent PC- or MacOS- only downloads from the Swatch site appear to behave the same - assuming they contain platform independent stuff like HTML, Java or Javascript.

I had been a staunch user of Phil Katz' PKARC package after he significantly improved the original ARC program in the mid-1980s. Then the guy in New Jersey who wrote ARC got in a totally unnecessary fight with him over whether Phil had copied his code instead of reverse-engineering it (welcome to the world of "share" ware). Phil then decided to revamp the whole project and wrote the PKZIP package which stormed the BBS world in the late 1980s and has proven to be stable and solid up to the present day. Check out his company, PKWARE for more info.

Then, in 1990, due to its success in the PC world, a number of people decided to try and port it to other platforms. To his credit, Phil gave the project his blessing and thus Info-Zip was born.

Info-Zip was the first net mailing list I ever signed up for, way back in 1990. (The second was RISKS-L, and then the mail deluge really started!) Jean-Loup Gailly was one of the leading developers along with Kai-Uwe Rommel, Mark Adler, Rich Wales, Greg Roelofs and many others. I was just a lurker, cheering on the gang, and they did in fact port the zip and unzip program to just about every platform imaginable (whence the motto, "The only program that runs on more platforms is 'Hello world'!)

Zip is the unfortunately rare example of a tool that matured and then was left alone. No bloat, no flaky extensions. It just works. I have zipped literally several million files into many thousands of archives over the years, and never had it fail, not even once (disk corruption issues aside). I've archived files of 15 bytes and 1500 megabytes. The encryption is reasonably good; it took the likes of Paul Kocher to really break it. It's efficient; some have been able to exceed its compression and speed abilities but it's solid and reliable enough that no other program has ever challenged it as the supreme cross-platform file archive utility.

The other notable thing about Info-Zip is that it was really one of the very first true "bazaar" style development projects on the net, combining the talents of programmers from all over the globe through what would now be considered ploddingly slow email and list connections. Info-Zip precedes Linux itself and many other similar development efforts by at least a couple of years, and hearkens back to RBBS as the true originator of distributed development of free software. Read all about it at the Info-Zip home page.

Jean-Loup was a key contributor to the success of Info-Zip as both a programming project and a new kind of development project literally spanning the globe. So if you don't mind, this is a big "hooray" for this news. I hope he does well at Mandrake, which is clearly meeting a need in the end-user market as Linux pushes outward past the "server-only" typecasting that certain industry pundits and major companies want to confine it to.

Allez!

-------

contains DBD::ODBC. should allow you to connect to odbc driver on nt box.

• very good one

But the applications and libararies and more than you want to deal with is on sunsite and the mirrors.

Have you really gone through it recently?

sample mirrors that are semisets (part subset part superset)
ftp.cdrom.com
ftp.rge.com

CPAN is a subset of these sites.

The cataloging is probably really important. Ex: looking for fast lookup. Examine zdbm. What? oh that is included with c-news or inn.

Moderators, please refrain from flagging information "Informative" unless you actually know it's correct. MNG is the new PNG-like standard for animation, while PNM is "portable anymap" - the simple truecolor format for Jef Poskanzer's pbmplus package.

First of all, a play by play critique:

"No one -- not a single person -- doing serious commercial Internet work would consider it for a moment. Why? Clients today (and busdev, marketing types when stuff is developed internally) still hold the 3.0+ rule as ironclad, and that rules out PNG."

So all the hype about XML is hot air too, since it's only to be supported in the 5.0 browsers. Samething goes for style sheets, etc. In fact, we might as well stop developing new features/formats/etc. because everyone will still be using 3.0 browsers.

"For the tens of millions of "nothing" sites out there that together represent a tiny percentage of Internet traffic have that as their option, of course, since they have little traffic anyway. Losing a few percent to people with old browsers isn't going to hurt them."

This is snobbery. Didn't slashdot start out as Rob Malda's little nothing programming homepage? Those nothing sites are a major part of the draw of net access. Say 20 people looked at my homepage. 10 of them were potential employers checking my resume at their convenience. The other 10 were geographicaly seperated friends just checking to see what's up. I may not be an Amazon or a Yahoo, but that nothing web page is one of (if not the) major reason I pay an ISP. If I just wanted to visit corporate high traffic sites, then I'd get cable television.

"PNG support is too spotty in the modern browsers to seriously do it anyway. They all seem to handle things like transparency differently, and things like that."

PNG transparency support is spotty b/c it is too advanced for today's browsers. In order to implement true alpha channel blending for the .png format, alpha blending must be built into the layout engine -- a nontrivial task. However, Mozilla will be feature alpha blending in the layout engine.

"On the low-end of the internet bell curve, wanna-be designers are way to infatuated with their animated GIFS -- the late 90's version of the blink tag. They're certainly not going to switch and give up their beloved animated icons collection."

MNG

anyway

Burn all gifs day is a publicity stunt much like the microsoft refund day. But the PNG image format has a _lot_ going for it. Alpha blending alone is enough to make PNG the favorite of designers. But it also supports variable bit depths from 2-24 bit color with loss-less compression, making PNG a complete solution (as opposed to the gif/jpeg situation we are in right now.) for most web graphic needs. Finally, since it would be built into the layout engine we might see a w3c style sheet for alpha blending on more elements than just png images -- another major feature.

.png's are the way to go. Excellent compression with little loss of image quality. Go here to find out more.

----------------

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein

Walnut Creek CDROM is www.cdrom.com. They're one of the principal sponsors of FreeBSD (and also support slackware, I don't know how extensively), and make their money selling stuff.

Check out the webpage (kind of an obvious place to look for your information ;-). The OS is FreeBSD and the machine is a single-CPU Xeon, which quite happily maxes out the network bandwidth serving up to 5000 users at once.

Machine configuration information is here (again, you could have found it for yourself in about 2 seconds of looking, but what the hell ;-)

Transfer stats for the machine are here (This one you can probably be excused for not finding yourself..)

They run FreeBSD and will happily tell you they couldn't maintain the current performance while switching to anything else without dubbleing the Hardware cost. ( Linux and Open BSD don't count as "something else" :).

They had 3 T3s at one stage but are at something like 200MBPs now. The server is practically on the Internet Backbone and the ISP doesn't actually charge them for the bandwidth it sucks. ( Somebody estimated $750.000 per year.

They run FreeBSD and will happily tell you they couldn't maintain the current performance while switching to anything else without dubbleing the Hardware cost. ( Linux and Open BSD don't count as "something else" :).

They had 3 T3s at one stage but are at something like 200MBPs now. The server is practically on the Internet Backbone and the ISP doesn't actually charge them for the bandwidth it sucks. ( Somebody estimated $750.000 per year.

As a long time BSD biggot [grin], I feel that I'm somewhat qualified to speak on this one...

Quite simply, one of the biggest misconceptions about the BSD's is that OpenBSD is more secure than all other OS's period. OpenBSD is more secure than any other OS out of the "box"--you can install the latest version and have a damn highly-secure box without any fuss. But FreeBSD or NetBSD can be(and properly patched and config'd and etc ARE) just as secure. By no means should you think that FreeBSD (or NetBSD for that matter) is not a secure OS. It just requires a little more work out of the "box" to fully secure it.

FreeBSD is definately where you should start, I agreee 100%. Even though they've recently opened their driver database for the rest of the BSD's, you're so much more likely to get FreeBSD running on your existing hardware than any of the others.

One of the best pieces of advice I can give the BSD newbie is to head to Walnut Creek's site and go ahead and pay for the subscription. About 4 times a year you get the latest FreeBSD delivered right to your door on a CD, which is extremely handy for handing out to friends who have seen the light :) And, you're supporting some great software (and the development of some future great software)!

As for WHY you should make the switch, just wait till you see the screaming performance. Something about a magic TCP stack, i dunno ;) but the Daemon just simply smokes with Apache.

---------
Question: How do I leverage the power of the internet?

As a long time BSD biggot [grin], I feel that I'm somewhat qualified to speak on this one...

Quite simply, one of the biggest misconceptions about the BSD's is that OpenBSD is more secure than all other OS's period. OpenBSD is more secure than any other OS out of the "box"--you can install the latest version and have a damn highly-secure box without any fuss. But FreeBSD or NetBSD can be(and properly patched and config'd and etc ARE) just as secure. By no means should you think that FreeBSD (or NetBSD for that matter) is not a secure OS. It just requires a little more work out of the "box" to fully secure it.

FreeBSD is definately where you should start, I agreee 100%. Even though they've recently opened their driver database for the rest of the BSD's, you're so much more likely to get FreeBSD running on your existing hardware than any of the others.

One of the best pieces of advice I can give the BSD newbie is to head to Walnut Creek's site and go ahead and pay for the subscription. About 4 times a year you get the latest FreeBSD delivered right to your door on a CD, which is extremely handy for handing out to friends who have seen the light :) And, you're supporting some great software (and the development of some future great software)!

As for WHY you should make the switch, just wait till you see the screaming performance. Something about a magic TCP stack, i dunno ;) but the Daemon just simply smokes with Apache.

---------
Question: How do I leverage the power of the internet?

The part that is not generally available are the maps from the game itself. The engine is available, but you have to download and put together your own information. With the proliferation of doom and quake sites this is not a problem.

John's original intent was to release the source code for each game engine a year after the game was released or when the next game engine was released. Doom and DoomII use the same engine, more or less and when quake was released John released the Doom code, actually a bit later since they had to have someone go in and clean out the third party software and clean up part of the code.

And now for some URL's

PlanetQuake probably the formost user site online for quake and doom related material. Any player of these games should not miss this site.

Quake 2 coding list.

id Softare id software's main website

id's source code archive

planetquake's finger information Latest .plan files from the gaming industries top game designers.

Where to find the Doom source

Cdrom and more files, look for various id titles

Lando

The part that is not generally available are the maps from the game itself. The engine is available, but you have to download and put together your own information. With the proliferation of doom and quake sites this is not a problem.

John's original intent was to release the source code for each game engine a year after the game was released or when the next game engine was released. Doom and DoomII use the same engine, more or less and when quake was released John released the Doom code, actually a bit later since they had to have someone go in and clean out the third party software and clean up part of the code.

And now for some URL's

PlanetQuake probably the formost user site online for quake and doom related material. Any player of these games should not miss this site.

Quake 2 coding list.

id Softare id software's main website

id's source code archive

planetquake's finger information Latest .plan files from the gaming industries top game designers.

Where to find the Doom source

Cdrom and more files, look for various id titles

Lando

--

--

You want better granularity on JavaScript? Look at this document and send comments to the Mozilla people.

Mozilla. It's not just open source, it's got turbo-studly bits.

PNG

MNG

IMHO, MNG is what we need to be promoting, because image animation is a checkbox item, however irritating some of us old codgers may find it.
--

PNG

MNG

IMHO, MNG is what we need to be promoting, because image animation is a checkbox item, however irritating some of us old codgers may find it.
--

"Many people think that Unisys has given permission for distributing free software to make GIF format. Unfortunately that is not what Unisys has actually done. Here is what Unisys actually says about the matter:

No license or license fees are required for non-commercial, not-for-profit GIF-based applications or for non-commercial, not-for-profit GIF-freeware, so long as the LZW capability provided is only for GIF. However, a license is required if freeware is incorporated into, or sold or distributed with a commercial or for-profit product, introduced in 1995 [or later], or enhancements of products that were introduced prior to 1995.

In other words, Unisys may allow the community to develop a program like the GIMP, but it can't be included in the Red Hat Boxed Set, or even the Cheapbytes $1.99 Debian CD, without Red Hat and Cheapbytes each paying royalties. This is NOT a good solution. Again, according to the GNU website, this turns Red Hat and Debian into "semi-free" operating systems. "[T]he distribution terms for the operating system as a whole are the conjunction of the distribution terms for all the programs in it. Adding one semi-free program to the system would make the system as a whole just semi-free. [...] Including one semi-free program in an operating system would cut off commercial CD-ROM distribution for it."

This is not a reasonable solution. I encourage everyone to convert their GIFs to JPEGs or PNGs instead. A good PNG overview site can be found at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/. Good luck!

Did you see the format of the bitmaps at the PNG-site: http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngapbr.html ??? Yep, gifs...

While they went to great lengths to say that one of the differences was how code was added to the base, they didn't really say why that matters that much.

Before, when I did a lot of custom drivers for Linux, I was continually annoyed with kernel interfaces changing, and code that was 'current' a week ago, suddenly becoming legacy.

With FreeBSD, I've had amazing longevity with my code. Not because they're slow to change, but because, in my opinion, (flame proof clothes ready) it was designed 'right' the first time.

The works of people like Kirk McKusick and David Greenman are quite possibly some of the best designs I've ever seen. Even if you don't plan on using FreeBSD, I think all developers should at least take a look at how it works, and I promise you'll learn a thing or two.

I also hold 'good design' as the reasons for why I've had systems with 400+ day uptimes, that were sometimes under nearly constant attack and/or intrusion attempts.

Finally, the BSD license. My 'day job' is designing an embedded product, which is using FreeBSD for it's OS. Why? The license. Many companies are hesitant, or even contractually prohibited, from giving out changes made to the system, which the GPL rather insists on. The BSD license is very open, which I think may become more important in the near future.

Go download a boot floppy, or buy a CD from Walnut Creek or even Cheap Bytes and give it a try. Even if you don't end up keeping it, if you're a hacker, you'll learn something. :)

• Web Server: FreeBSD 3.2-STABLE with Apache 1.3.9 / PHP 3.0.9 on a PII-400 w/128 Meg RAM, IBM 4.55G U2W Drive. Due to FreeBSD's proven track record for Web/Network performance, stability, and security (e.g. Yahoo, wcarchive, and others), it's a natural.
• SQL Server: Linux 2.2.x with MySQL 3.22.25 on a PII-400 w/256 Meg RAM, IBM 4.55G U2W System Drive and a Mylex AcceleRAID 250 w/4 IBM 4.55G U2W Drives in a RAID-5 configuration. Linux was the obvious choice when considering MySQL performance and driver availability wrt RAID controllers.

• Apache: Ensure you have adequate spare servers to handle the connections (StartServers, MaxSpareServers, MaxClients, and MaxRequestsPerClient in the config); nothing sucks more than clients not being able to connect. Also, if you are using embedded script of some sort (PHP, Perl, etc.), use modules compiled into Apache (mod_perl, etc.); this should significantly increase speed and decrease the overhead of reloading the module for each access.
• MySQL: Tweak the applicable setting as appropriate. We increased (usually doubled in most cases) the following: Join Buffer, Key Buffer, Max Connections, Max Join Size, Max Sort Length, Sort Buffer, and Sort Buffer). If possible, depending on the amount of data, get as much memory in the system as possible. If the OS can maintain frequently used data cached, disk access won't be required which significantly increases the speed of queries, etc. In addition, get rid of that pre-compiled MySQL and compile it yourself. If possible, optimize using egcs/pgcc for your platform. Also, compile mysqld statically; this will increase it's memory overhead a bit but can increase it's speed by 5 - 10% by not using shared libraries.
• Storage: For optimum speed, use SCSI (of course). For our data, we require RAID 5 for redundancy. If that is not required, RAID 0 (striping) can be used for increased speed. The optimal way is to use hardware RAID (external RAID or RAID controller). Luckily, Linux has drivers for quite a few different RAID controllers that are available for a reasonable price.
• Linux: Beware of Redhat's security problems, disable all unnecessary services, et. al. Seek out security-oriented and Linux performance-tuning sites for more suggestions.
• General: Don't skimp on hardware. A cheap component, be it a drive, network card, motherboard, or whatever, if it fails, will cause unrecoverable downtime. We decided on Intel NL440BX boards (serial console/BIOS support is nice), PII-400's, and IBM SCSI drives in both boxes. If one box were to have a catastrophic failure, the other is able to perform both webserver and SQL server functions if necessary. We can also simply replace a failed component with one pulled from a similarly-configured non-production (test) box, or just swap boxes altogether.

Perhaps it is time to come out with GIFv2. This would be identical with GIFv1, except that the compression step would be replaced with an unpatented algorithm. zlib comes to mind. Such a simple, nobrainer transformation would give web site developers a GIF indistinguishable in functionality from the old, and at the same time give the maintainers of GIF tools an ultra-easy enhancement they could do to improve the salability of their work.

This Unisys story remembers me something I read on The Onion last year. It was about Bill Gates patenting the binary system, ultimately demanding a tax on everything. I really want to see how Unisys are going to tax millions of users all over the world.

Just another thing, have you noticed that the PNG Now! button is a GIF? http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/img_pn g/pngnow.gif

Probably the best advice I can give is to review the FreeBSD Web Site and especially the FreeBSD Handbook. Remember, you can always search the FreeBSD mailing list archives if you have problems.

Another excellent resource is the Complete FreeBSD Book, which costs about $40, but is well worth it. If you decide to go with FreeBSD, an Internet-based installation will work, but all the hard-core FreeBSD users have FreeBSD Disc Sets from Walnut Creek CDROM.

In the end, I guess it took me about a week of normal use to get accustomed to FreeBSD's way of the world. After a few days you'll start to notice that, in the ways that FreeBSD differs from Linux, those ways will make total sense from an implementation or an overall-system standpoint.

Probably the best advice I can give is to review the FreeBSD Web Site and especially the FreeBSD Handbook. Remember, you can always search the FreeBSD mailing list archives if you have problems.

Another excellent resource is the Complete FreeBSD Book, which costs about $40, but is well worth it. If you decide to go with FreeBSD, an Internet-based installation will work, but all the hard-core FreeBSD users have FreeBSD Disc Sets from Walnut Creek CDROM.

In the end, I guess it took me about a week of normal use to get accustomed to FreeBSD's way of the world. After a few days you'll start to notice that, in the ways that FreeBSD differs from Linux, those ways will make total sense from an implementation or an overall-system standpoint.

While trying to take M8 through the PNG test suite, two things became apparent:

PNG rendering is atrocious, even in comparison to Netscape.

The navigation stuff is still unstable enough to make it unusable for everyday web browsing. The Back button, Forward button, and even clicking on certain links after the site had already been visited were intermittent at best.

• Netscape 4.04 and later (all platforms)
  - no transparency or gamma
  
• MS Internet Explorer 4.0b1 and later
  - broken transparency, gamma is supported
  
• Opera 3.51 or later
  - transparency (1 bit only) and gamma support
  

This really is a catastrophe , although maybe positive in the long run --

(a) another demonstration of the importance of avoiding patented code / libraries / algorithms;
(b) an incentive to get people moving to PNGs;
(c) everyone has it burnt into their brains : BAD Unisys ... BAD Unisys ...

Typo, the last paragraph of my post got mangled. It should say:

I've seen this sort of thing tried by a few people, mostly selling CD-ROMs like irtc.org or cdrom.com, I've never actually bought one though, so perhaps this model doesn't work so well. For me, the issue is often price. I'm usually not willing to pay US$25 for what's on the CD, even with the donation. OTOH, I often check the 'give $5 to debian' box
when ordering from cheapbytes.

I like the suggestion of a 'click here to donate' button, and this is perhaps more like 'street performers' work. In my town it doesn't seem very lucrative (simple begging often seems to get better money) but the vastly larger audience available online might make all the difference.

Another point I rarely see mentioned is the value of physical objects. Perhaps I'm being retro here, but much of what I'm willing to pay money for is the physical medium the content comes on. The CD with liner notes, the nicely bound volume. I don't want everything that way, and I agree that selling content doesn't work very well. However, producing and distributing media costs money and it makes sense to me to pay for them. This is a lot like the model behind commercial linux distributions, but I rarely hear it applied to artistic works.

This means no intellectual property, you can release the content freely, but feed back a little bit of the purchase price for distributed media to the artist . copyleft runs sort of like this. Publish on demand could help with this (and to some extent solve the problem of how to serialize a novel) by letting the publisher collect orders in batches and then fire off a run. This should scale well with the popularity of the work. CDs are a case where the technology is better developed: lots up to 100 or so can be done with with CD burners, 500-10000 with short run pressings.

There is the worry that another publisher will take the released content and undersell without supporting the author. This is quite likely to happen, but there are couteracting forces: If we've decided that a material object is what we're charging money for we can compete on the basis of quality, design and packaging. Even if the content is freely distributable, the cover doesn't have to be. People can buy the 'official' version because it's recommended by the author, because it donates to a cause they believe in, because it has better cover art/liner notes. Some will go with the cheaper edition, but who's to say that's bad. Is it really worse than the current system of giving most of the profit to the retailer and the publisher (as distinct from the author)?

I've seen this sort of thing tried by a few people, mostly selling CD-ROMs like irtc.org or cdrom.comcheapbytes.

actually, id has the quake 2 source posted on their ftp site, and has for quite a while. check here

> I just installed freeBSD I didnt like it...

I'm sorry...

> I wanted to see whitch was more solid freeBSD
> seemed nice but A lot of the basics just
> wouldnt work like *netscape* which hurt my
> feelings..

That's odd...I've used both the FreeBSD and Linux versions of Netscape here with out problems.

> ALso does anyone know where i can get the BSD kernel source?

If you are looking for an online reference, check out http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi. If you want to download the source, you can get 'ssys.*' from ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/FreeBSD/3. 2-RELEASE/src/. However, just remember that FreeBSD is more than just a kernel, it is an Operating System.

>I have never used a BSD, or even seen one in action.

Never used ftp.cdrom.com, www.yahoo.com, almost any irc server, etc?

Not to be anti-Linux, but have you considered migrating to FreeBSD? Other than FreeBSD's ability to run BSDi binaries (in case you have software that cannot be easily ported or is not open source) and Linux binaries, compile most applications with little or no changes, and similiar in many aspects of configuration, FreeBSD is, like, Linux, open source. In addition, FreeBSD has proven itself time and again running high-profile sites such as ftp.cdrom.com, www.yahoo.com, and even the Microsoft-owned www.hotmail.com. See www.freebsd.org for more information.

read the file describing the configuration.

It's a Siliconrax SR-485 rack mount peripheral chassis with a built in 9" or 10" monitor

It also houses the Mylex DAC960SXI SCSI-SCSI 6 channel RAID controller, w/256MB cache.

You'd have to see if Linux could handle it first. Ftp.cdrom.com runs on FreeBSD.

• One 500MHz Intel Pentium-III Xeon CPU w/512K L2 cache
• 4GB of main memory (16 * 256MB 50ns ECC EDO DIMMs)
• 1 Adaptec AHA-2940U2W PCI single-channel wide Ultra-2 SCSI controller
• 2 Adaptec AHA-3940AUW PCI dual-channel wide UltraSCSI controller
• 1 Intel Pro/100+ PCI 100Mbps Fast Ethernet controller
• 1 Bay Networks Netgear GA620 Gigabit Ethernet adapter

The file contains more detailed information on the configuration. Also, there's a picture available here.

• One 500MHz Intel Pentium-III Xeon CPU w/512K L2 cache
• 4GB of main memory (16 * 256MB 50ns ECC EDO DIMMs)
• 1 Adaptec AHA-2940U2W PCI single-channel wide Ultra-2 SCSI controller
• 2 Adaptec AHA-3940AUW PCI dual-channel wide UltraSCSI controller
• 1 Intel Pro/100+ PCI 100Mbps Fast Ethernet controller
• 1 Bay Networks Netgear GA620 Gigabit Ethernet adapter

The file contains more detailed information on the configuration. Also, there's a picture available here.

From http://www.cdrom.com:

Slackware - Linux is a UNIX clone, developed by Linus Torvalds and
thousands of volunteers on the Internet. Slackware is a heavy-duty version of
Linux for mid-size businesses and departments but user-friendly enough for
home users. Preorder Slackware 4.0, or order Slackware 3.6 now for only
$39.95.

User-friendly enough and not orgasmically super-uber user-friendly with thought-sensing GNOME applets - now allows you to dream in one of many GTK themes!

Presumably, the original poster didn't want to pay any cash for it so here's a better solution.

The pure humor of it all...


From behind the scenes of www.microsoft.com


Hardware

Six internal Ethernets provide 100 megabits of capacity each
2 OCI2s provide 1.2 gigabits of capacity to the Internet
Runs on Compaq Proliant 5000s and 5500s, with 4 Pentium Pro processors and 512 megabytes (MB) of RAM each.



Software


Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0
Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0 (IIS)Microsoft Index Server 2.0
Microsoft SQL Server 7
Other Microsoft tools and applications



Powerful Solutions


www.microsoft.com started out as a single box beneath a developer's desk in 1994, handling about a million hits a
day. That seems almost laughable now. A sleek data center in Redmond, Wash., receives more than 228 million
hits a day while data centers in London and Tokyo shoulder the international load of about 12 million daily hits.
How has the site handled its explosive growth while keeping its hardware to a minimum? How does it administer
one of the largest databases in the world? How does it manage the challenges of a decentralized publishing
environment? How does it come close to achieving 100 percent site availability? The answers lie in the
strength of its software, according to site architects. The whole shebang runs on Microsoft Windows NT 4.0,
IIS 4.0, and SQL 7.0. "Our site showcases Microsoft technology," says systems operations manager Todd
Weeks. "We prove every day that we can run one of the largest sites in the world 100 percent off of
Microsoft technology."


The Challenge


Not only is www.microsoft.com an enormous site with hundreds of thousands of pages of content. Not only
does it receive millions of hits a day. Not only has its growth been unrelenting. Those are some of the
easy challenges, site architects say. One of the most interesting challenges is that www.microsoft.com
functions within a decentralized publishing environment. More than 300 writers and developers working in more
than 51 locations around the world provide information for the site. These content providers are able to update
their sites within the www.microsoft.com umbrella as often as eight times a day. In fact, 5 percent to 6
percent of the site is updated every day. The complexity of that publishing environment is daunting
when you consider that each of the 29 content servers in Redmond contains the nearly 300,000 pages of
information that comprise www.microsoft.com. But the end result is that the information on www.microsoft.com
is as current and up-to-date as possible. A team of about eight people staffs three shifts around the clock
to ensure www.microsoft.com stays up and running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "Our goal is to make the
site available to users 99.8 percent of the time," Weeks says. So how do we reach that lofty goal of 99.8
percent availability? (The 0.2 percent down time is required for routine maintenance.)


First, the Hardware


The physical architecture behind www.microsoft.com seems surprisingly modest. Twenty-nine servers host
general Web content; 25 servers host SQL, 6 respond to site searches; 3 service download requests along
with another 30 in distributed data centers; and 3 host FTP content. Additional servers overseas handle
some of the international load.




Did you count all of that? That's 96 Compaq Reliant 5000s & 5500s (Quad Pentium Pro boxes with 512Mb RAM) running
www.microsoft.com using NT, IIS, Index Server, and SQL Server.



Standard .message file for ftp.cdrom.com



This machine is a P6/200 with 1GB of memory & 1/2 terabyte of RAID 5.
The operating system is FreeBSD. Should you wish to get your own copy of
FreeBSD, see the pub/FreeBSD directory or visit http://www.freebsd.org
for more information. FreeBSD on CDROM can be ordered using the WEB at
http://www.cdrom.com/titles/os/freebsd.htm or by sending email to
orders@cdrom.com.


Now, which site do you suppose has set more download records?