Slashdot Mirror

who would of thought that

you're a troll and a shit one at that

It's just easier to use a gui - not faster but certainly easier.

Maybe for you it is, personally I find a nice clean xml config file way easier to deal with.

I remember one incident trying to get iis to serve up a file. I had to alter the "security" settings in no less than 3 different iis menus befor the frickin thing would serve it up.

The menus are like a maze that one must climb through. The feature that you want could be anywhere in that maze. With XML and a decent editor you can just do a find.

they fall somewhat short on some of the advanced features businesses need for enterprise apps

Or perhaps just think they need after a bunch of marketing mumbojumbo. There are pretty big sites on the net that use Apachr/PHP, Bravenet.com comes to mind, you could probably find others at netcraft.com I don't use this setup personally, but I see a quite a few large sites that do, and they seem to be making money.

it's java for windows basically

I will never understand why people would write in a "java for windows" when they can write in a Java for all operating systems. C# seems to me like a less sophisticated version of Java that has the added drawback of locking you in to a single platform.

Sounds like MS Marketing BS, but 1 and 2 are possible on most UNIX systems, Linux and pre-.net versions of Windows, so that's not new.

Why would .net affect ping times? If it did, was this compared to older versions of Windows, Linux or Solaris?

A few weeks uptime is nothing to brag about.

As for total cost of ownership, it's always a case of your mileage will vary, it depends on where your staff has most skills. Personally I consider maintaining unix systems a lot easier and a lot less effort so that would cut down the TCO in that case. Get a bunch of McSE's and the results would be different, as would getting someone with an equal balanced knowledge in windows and unix.

We can't assume Apache and IIS are roughly equivalent in terms of code defects, and we certainly can't make any assumptions on the OS based on the fragmentary information given by Reasoning.

For one, a large number of the "defects" listed by Reasoning are false positives. Such as warning about dereferencing a NULL pointer where the pointer cannot possibly be NULL due to an action on the previous line.
And second, we have no idea what they compared Apache to or how they got ahold of the source code to these mystery commercial offerings. They could be making everything up, and I'm inclined to believe that they are given the reluctance of commercial providers to disclose source code.

The facts is, IIS has a much smaller market share than Apache according to netcraft and is closed-source so attackers can't just read the code... Yet it's broken more often according to Zone-H and more advisories come out for IIS than Apache according to CERT.
Statistically speaking, IIS must have a much higher incidence of severe defects.

Your comment was not insightful. It was misleading.

Why did they use the development branch of Apache, when only a handful of sites are running it? I would have found an analysis of the stable 1.3 branch, which 60% of the web-serving world uses, to be more informative.

Netcraft on Reasoning.com's webserver. Apache 1.3.23 on Redhat.

The site reasoning.com is running Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) on Linux.

Apache isn't dying.

So whatever these people claim about the quality of Apache is really not useful. For being the most used web server software (a factor of 3 over certain commercial offerings) with continued growth, it suffers from the least bugs and is generally the most stable.

Are we to read this as anything other than FUD?

Analysis of the quantity of bugs in a software application is by no means a qualitative analysis of the performance of that application.

The predominant httpd servers available on the market today are Apache; iPlanet/SunOne; and IIS. Additionally, there are lesser-known httpd servers (zeus, cern), as well as 'niche' httpd servers (caucho) which typically perform additional functions to parsing HTML code (such as acting as a Java server, etc).

According to Netcraft, Apache is the #1 httpd server in use today, and has been for nearly 7 years.

Regardless of the purported 'quality' provided by commercial, closed-source alternatives, the Apache httpd server is the only solution in the marketplace that supports - in a stable, qualitative fashion - a startling variety of additional software to provide functionality to a website.

A primary example of this bundled flexibility would be the vast number of scripting languages supported by Apache. Java, Perl, PHP, and TCL are all free, stable, and work wonderfully with Apache. This kind of flexibility in application environments is simply unparalleled by the other httpd servers.

You might say that 'you can run java, perl, php, and tcl on iPlanet or IIS, though'. Sure you can. Have you tried that?

First, your commercial vendor won't support it - Microsoft will only support you if you're running ASP.NET et al on IIS; Sun will only support you if you're running Java on iPlanet.

Second, non-supported scripting languages often don't work on non-apache httpd servers. Why? Because the source code for the httpd server isn't available to the scripting language developers - making intelligent integration more difficult - additionally, the major vendors don't test competitive scripting language functionality on their products, meaning that while the writers of PHP, Perl, TCL, etc may offer a version of their product for other httpd servers - Microsoft and Sun aren't testing them on their httpd servers - plus, they aren't guaranteed to work, and often don't. (At my company, we've never been able to get PHP to work correctly under iPlanet - and guess what? Sun doesn't give a shit. Big surprise, huh?).

Commerical httpd servers may indeed have less bugs - but they certainly are not as stable in performance, nor do they support as wide a variety of available software extensions - as Apache.

I'll gladly take that extra .02 in software bugs over a commercial, proprietary httpd server any day.

...then why is it their webserver? :)

Of course it is Apache 1.3.23...

Check out Paypal's Fees for Recieving Payments for Businesses. You pay 2.9% plus a 30 cent transaction fee. Meaning that selling a 25 cent webcomic will cost you about 31 cents. Paypal is good for a lot of things, but it's not a micropayment service.

(As a side note, if you need another reason to support BitPass, they're powered entirely by open source software. I like that.)

PayPal has 10 Million members that you can send your money too, while BitPass currently only has three.

Well, Paypal once had only 3 members, too.

But you've got a point. It doesn't matter how sweet the implementation of a micropayment service is if there aren't many people using it. So I'm building a BitPass User Group website to facilitate adoption of it. Interested parties can check out my journal for details.

And they're not using Linux as the webserver:

Sez Netcraft:

The site www.celinuxforum.org is running Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) FrontPage/5.0.2.2623 on Solaris 8.

Bastards... (just kidding... I think this is a great initiative!)

Well, according to NetCraft, their server is running FreeBSD. Go figure ...

"Two nations with McDonald's have never gone to war with each other". Yes, that is true,...

No, it's not. India & Pakistan, 3 wars and counting... 1965, 1971, 1999.

For good measure... i thought i'd do a netcraft on their respective McDonald's websites. ;)

The site www.mcdonaldsindia.com is running Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) PHP/4.3.0 mod_perl/1.25 on Linux

The site www.mcdonalds-pakistan.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
P.S. No uptime is currently available for www.mcdonalds-pakistan.com.

"Two nations with McDonald's have never gone to war with each other". Yes, that is true,...

No, it's not. India & Pakistan, 3 wars and counting... 1965, 1971, 1999.

For good measure... i thought i'd do a netcraft on their respective McDonald's websites. ;)

The site www.mcdonaldsindia.com is running Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) PHP/4.3.0 mod_perl/1.25 on Linux

The site www.mcdonalds-pakistan.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
P.S. No uptime is currently available for www.mcdonalds-pakistan.com.

Is anyone else finding this site ungodly slow. No suprise! A check with Netcraft shows it to be running IIS 5.0. Lord! Folks here have been trying all day to get in--only two of us have made it and we've both been stuck on the submission page for 30+ minutes. Probably running Moose-and-Squirrel SQLServer, too... Compared to how Apache handled the Starr Report, this is a great banner for Microsoft and it reads not ready for enterprise play.

Take your "266 machine" and your script kiddie toys and play with these people. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, take your $100 bill, fold it till it's all sharp corners and shove it up your ass.

OS, Web Server and Hosting History for donotcall.gov

unknown Microsoft-IIS/5.0 27-Jun-2003 206.16.196.198 CERFnet

Hosted on IIS...

(netcraft says)

Not that's any part of the problem

Well, there goes my uptime.

Anyone else notice www.sco.com is running linux?
www.netcraft.com

According to Netcraft, they've been running (sensibly enough) Solaris/Apache on net-facing systems. For a while they also had Linux boxes there. I'm guessing the bootlegged Windows systems were probably for billing/admin use.

Netcraft!

Linux!!! :)

Whatch out, or netcraft will be /.'ed

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.sco. com

'Nuff said.

Anyone else find this ironic?

That is seriously bizarre.

But at least it's running Linux!

The old DRM Lobby has been trying a bit too hard. Some old folks in congress have got such a huge misunderstanding of how the machines that power our lives work it's incredible.

BTW, according to netcraft http://www.hatchmusic.com/ is running Apache on Linux.

That means Linus, as well as most other programmers who have worked on Linux or Apache would be able to remotely destroy his site. Bill Gates would be able to destroy 90% of the computers in existence.

I suppose this law would quickly be followed by a law making it illegal to block the port they pick. Or maybe they will just talk to your ISP, go to your house and take your computer. They can cut them up with axes in the street like the old prohibition days. I bet Hatch can remember those days himself. :)

I guess someone at sco is still playing with linux as according to Netcraft somthing has been updated on their apache server today !

Linux Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 PHP/4.3.2-RC 17-Jun-2003 216.250.140.112 NFT
Linux Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 PHP/4.0.3pl1 20-Nov-2002 216.250.140.112 NFT

You can bet your ass that if Macs were as ubiqutous as x86 machines, they'd be getting slammed with worms too...

While your point seems logical, there are some glaring examples that disprove similar arguments. For example, Netcraft shows Apache running more than twice as many web servers as IIS, but when the exploits come around, which platform gets nailed?

All the recent worms I can remember use some sort of Windows hole to get in and then Outlook to spread themselves. You claim that's because Windows is far more common, but doesn't most email get routed by Unix boxen over the 'net? Why attack the endpoints when all the middle nodes are right there in front of you? Hack a Unix box, take over sendmail, and you have access to every piece of mail that passes through the machine. Why don't people do that?

The answer is that the endpoints, the Windows clients, are much easier to get into. MacOS X is built on top of BSD, which has a security track record that is way, way better than Windows. I believe you are incorrect, and if tomorrow everybody turned off their Windows boxen and turned on a Mac, you'd pretty much see the end of this kind of thing, at least for a long while.

Doug

Yes, it is.

Yup! Noy, oh, boy, they sure do! (-:

From NetCraft: Recent Changes at Notable Sites:

One site that has not changed is www.sco.com, where people continue to delight in the irony of SCO using the operating system whose deployment they are seeking to restrict.

From NetCraft: Recent Changes at Notable Sites:

One site that has not changed is www.sco.com, where people continue to delight in the irony of SCO using the operating system whose deployment they are seeking to restrict.

For a company that seems to hate Linux so much it is funny to see via Netcraft that Sco's site SCO.COM is running Linux. Seemed they used to use SCO UNIX but switched to Linux according to the graphs. Yet IBM, that pushes Linux runs on AIX.

For a company that seems to hate Linux so much it is funny to see via Netcraft that Sco's site SCO.COM is running Linux. Seemed they used to use SCO UNIX but switched to Linux according to the graphs. Yet IBM, that pushes Linux runs on AIX.

Here's some more interesting news about SCO. According to Netcraft, SCO's website is ironically hosted on Linux.

Here's some more interesting news about SCO. According to Netcraft, SCO's website is ironically hosted on Linux.

Here's some more interesting news about SCO. According to Netcraft, SCO's website is ironically hosted on Linux.

Linux uptimes comparable with Solaris on busy sites

You do have to remember a few things, however:

1) Linux boxes that have uptimes of 400+ days are still using kernels that have the uptime rollovers at ~497 days, when the 32-bit long unsigned integer used to count the number of uptime seconds resets to 0, and the uptimes returned look like the machine had been rebooted at that point.* This is one reason that you don't see any Linux machines on the Top 50 uptimes page at Netcraft.

2) Consider what Solaris is mostly used for these days: webserver and database server (from what I've seen from experience, that is). The hardware architectures of Sun machines (SPARC processors with loads of L1 cache, fast Ultra-wide SCSI disks, and spectacular memory managment of the SunOS kernel) make these machines perfect for applications where there would be lots of disk accessing going on, such as a web server or a database server.

* I haven't had any machines stay up long enough to see this for myself, but does anyone know if this bug has been fixed, and if so, since what release?

Disclaimer: Please, this really isn't an attempt to start an OS flame war, so don't reply to this with your opinion about which OS is better!

The article leaves out the "other" main competitor for stability as seen on Netcraft's top uptime sites BSD.

Linux uptimes comparable with Solaris on busy sites

Comparisons of mean time between reboots on Linux and Solaris are very topical, as the top are often thrown head to head in cost benefit analysis of server platforms. It is interesting to review the uptimes of some of the internet's busier servers hosted at Sun, Google and Akamai. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is how few reboots there are on the networks, given the amount of traffic they see, though in absolute numbers the average number of days between reboots is higher at Sun than either of the two Linux based companies.

One site that has not changed is www.sco.com, where people continue to delight in the irony of SCO using the operating system whose deployment they are seeking to restrict.

One site that has not changed is www.sco.com, where people continue to delight in the irony of SCO using the operating system whose deployment they are seeking to restrict.

The site sco.com is running Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 PHP/4.0.3pl1 on Linux.

I'll try to briefly sum this up, but don't you dare to reply without reading the rest:

MSIE is a terrible browser because it is filled with security holes, it is bloated, and the user interface is so basic it slows down your surfing compared to other browsers. It is also a bitch to code web pages for, and pretends to know better than the web author what is supposed to be done.

As for foul business practices, open your eyes! Microsoft is well known for the way they reach into new markets and eliminate the competition. They even backstab their own partners if needed.

Read on for a more thorough explanation:

"What, exactly, is so bad about IE, other than the fact that it's not open source and you can't hack away at it to your heart's content?"

I am a Windows user, and I couldn't care less about "hacking away" at the source code. What is so bad about IE is that it is has an incredible amount of serious security holes, many of which are still not patched, and when they are patched, you will often find that things like certain JavaScript sites stop working properly. This is probably because of the severe code bloat MSIE suffers from. It is huge!

And before you give me the "but MSIE is used by a lot more people than other browsers" argument to justify Microsoft's incompetence when it comes to handling security, let me remind you that:

1. Most of the people using MSIE are using it because they are clueless and don't know better. More users does not automatically mean that more users are looking for (and discovering) security holes.
2. Apache, the open-source web server, is the most widely used web server, and is run on more than twice the number of sites IIS, Microsoft's offering, according to Netcraft. Despite this, IIS has had far more and far more serious security holes than Apache.

Think about that for a minute before you choose to respond (or not).

MSIE is also terrible to code for. It tries to guess what I am trying to do, and often it guesses wrong. If you have ever tried to write server-side scripts that, say, are to do something else with a file than MSIE wants to do, you will know that it can be a pain to work around MSIE's "I know better than you what you are trying to do".

Moving on quickly, the user interface is terrible. It is so basic it is unusable. It slows down a lot if you open a lot of windows, and I regularly have 20-30 browser windows open. Not only that, but it clutters the Windows task bar with these windows. With other browsers, I can keep everything within the main browser window. MSIE also is a heaven for spammers with their neverending loops of popup windows. To conclude: MSIE's user interface is unusable. It is too basic and it slows down my browsing tenfold. I can't use mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, can't block popups, and so on. No doubt, you will point out that there are addon shells for MSIE. Great. Use them if you want to. But my point still stands: Most people will never even know about these, or about alternative browsers. But this isn't just about the user interface. The very core of the browser is severely flawed, from the ground up.

And it has terrible support for standards compared to Opera and Mozilla. It can't even get basic CSS positioning right.

Do I have to go on?

"It's what most web pages were designed to be viewed under, it's perfectly stable (er... recent versions, anyway), and (above all) it's fast and unbloated."

Excuse me? MSIE is terribly slow when I try to use it, simply because it has a terrible way to handle multiple windows and other basic user interface features that already exist in better browsers.

As for "unbloated" - you must be kidding me. For one, most of MSIE is buried in the operating

It's official, Netcraft confirms lhd.zdnet.com is dead. It is certainly missed. Truly an Internet icon. ;-)

It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is growing

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Windows community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has risen yet again, now up to more than 30 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has gained more market share , this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is sending other OSes into complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by topping the charts in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Daemon to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a long and prosperous future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Windows Server because *BSD is growing. Things are looking very good for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to gain market share. Red ink flows from Redmond like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most loved of them all, having gained 93% more core developers. The sudden and pleasant release of the long developed 5.0 only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is growing.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

FreeBSD leaders state that there are innumerable users of FreeBSD. How many users of FreeBSD are there? Let's see. Every time FreeBSD a huge number of FreeBSD users cvsup their tree with the closest mirror. Notice there are hundreds of FreeBSD mirrors under constant stress. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts, of which there are many hundreds per day.

Due to the merger of Walnut Creek and BSDi, and Juniper JunOS, cool new technologies and so on, FreeBSD is expanding into more markets than ever. FreeBSD has become more than the sum of its parts.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily gained in market share. *BSD is very powerful and its long term survival prospects are very bright. If Windows is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to improve. The progress achieved is nothing short of a miracle. For all practical purposes, *BSD is alive and kicking.

Fact: *BSD will kick your ass

It's a good job you're so sure of your self that you're able to post the URLs to the netcraft results. They look a little like this:

Passport Login running Windows/IIS
Hotmail Main Page running Windows/IIS
Advertising Server now running Windows/IIS, as I promised it would be a couple of posts back.
Image Server running Windows/IIS.

Did it ever occur to you to (i)get your facts right, and (ii)stop being a tosswit before you started posting? It looks like I received mod points for being right, and you have received none for being wrong.

The truth gets one the respect from ones peers that one rightfullys deserves, should one choose to emit the truth. You really should consider giving that a go.

It's a good job you're so sure of your self that you're able to post the URLs to the netcraft results. They look a little like this:

Passport Login running Windows/IIS
Hotmail Main Page running Windows/IIS
Advertising Server now running Windows/IIS, as I promised it would be a couple of posts back.
Image Server running Windows/IIS.

Did it ever occur to you to (i)get your facts right, and (ii)stop being a tosswit before you started posting? It looks like I received mod points for being right, and you have received none for being wrong.

The truth gets one the respect from ones peers that one rightfullys deserves, should one choose to emit the truth. You really should consider giving that a go.