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Red Hat Finishes Last
JTMatrix writes "RedHat takes last place [in an IDG Network Operating Systems showdown]." The information on how they benchmarked everything is readily available on the site. Go check it out. Update: 01/26 01:07 by H :Check out this link for more technical information.
Does useradd work with NIS?
That requires a script. the NIS tables themselves are easily updated with 'pushd /var/yp ; make ; popd'.
I am using a 512k DSL line, I am getting sub 100ms ping times to slashdot.org conistently. Now why does it take so long to respond? Sounds like a crappy OS problem, not a "bandwidth", packetloss, or latency problem at all. Ok PAL?
>I would rather have to know what I am doing and
>have something very simpe and manageable to work
>with rather than have some huge incomprehensible
>nest of crap that I am shielded from by an
>extravagant GUI.
You'd think, after the debacle of @Home's clients' lack of security bringing that UDP so close, people would be a little more aware that "system administration" is not a "point-n-click" job. It takes some awareness of the environment of the machine as well as the environment in which the machine will be operating.
Pretty buttons are irrelevent, and a GUI can often get in the way by reducing flexibility.
There is also a bit on their methodologies at http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2 000/0124how.html
Tuning Parameters http://www.nwfusion.com/rev iews/2000/0124revtuning.html
And, the results In MS Excel format! http://www2.nwfusion.com/download/012 4nos.xls
Fight spam: insist on the source! Can you imagine eating something that didn't come with an ingredient list?
Sure, do it every time I eat at a resturant...
Maybe you need to find a better motto...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I know this is long, but there are a lot of issues covered when speaking about OSes. Reply with your thoughts. Anyone else notice the line that says: You can configure Samba only through a cryptic configuration ASCII file - a serious drawback. Personally, I use the web based configuration tool SWAT. Works well and is easy to use. It would be nice if journalists actually checked there sources. Next we have this item: Red Hat Linux comes with three manuals - an installation guide, a getting started guide and a reference manual - all of which are easy to follow. This is all true but what about the online documentation? What about the man pages? On some items of Win NT you can spend days parsing through the help files, but almost all Linux questions can be answered in a man page or at least get you pointed in the right direction. Next we have stability. As with NT 4.0, Windows 2000 provides memory protection, which means that each process runs in its own segment. That's all well and good but what are the average uptimes with Windows 2000. I use the latest beta release on one machine and have an average uptime of about 4 days. This is on a lightly hit server with ftp and IIS running. My Linux box has been up for 185 days and that's only because i needed to add a new NIC. I don't mean to make this the standard Windows / Linux debate so let's include the others. Novell -- great performance as they said, configuration is easy, documentation is lacking, uptime is average (my novell 5 box is up for about 50 days.) Plays well with Windows clients, not so well with others. All in all, they did an average job at reviewing Novell. Sco Unix -- Seems to be a beast of an OS, but then again so is Win 2000. Stability is great (as in almost all UNIces). Doesn't play very nicely with others, but does have great documentation. They had a decent review of this OS all though I would have liked to have seen a focus on the nice backup utilities and the stability factor. Bottom Line. 1. Win 2000 is fine if you are a Microsoft shop and have all windows clients and servers. The main reason to upgrade would be a need for Active Dircetory services. This is a very cool tool, but more than likely isn't worth the headaches that come with Win 2000. In other words, if you have NT 4, stay there. 2. Novell 5 -- Novell 5 offers some major benefits over 4.1 such as the pure IP implementation (IPX packets are encapsulated into IP), and overall speed and stability. NDS is top notch for managing network objects but still is lacking when it comes to playing nicely with other OSes. This is a good upgrade from 4.1. It's also a better choice currently for the Microsoft shops that don't need Win 2000 features. 3. Linux -- Ahhh! My obvious favorite. This OS has many things going for it. Open Source is the main thing, you guys know the arguements. Bottom line is that if a Linux product doesn't do exactly what I want it to do, I can play with the source to accomodate my needs. This sure beats waiting a couple weeks to a year for Microsoft to patch a bug (feature) in one of their products. It also means that security holes are found faster and are patched faster than a closed system like Novell or Microsoft. If you think security by obscurity works, then stop reading now!!! If your server isn't behind a firewall, Linux would be my number one candidate. If you are behind a good firewall, internal security is still very important. Somewhere between 70% - 95% of all breaches come from internal sources. So the features of Linux and Novell would need to be compared to make a final decision. 4. SCO Unix -- Stable, great documentation, somewhat feature lacking, average performance, but doesn't break. The main feature is that it scales well, but if you want a system that scales really well, look at SGI. There's my opinion based on my administration experience. Any comments? Feel free to e-mail me. Hopefully its not to hard to decode my e-mail address.
No doubt. I vote the headline is changed to network showdown or something. Not once in the article did they say anything to terribly bad about Redhat, infact Win 2k took most of the heat.
They gave a lot of points to "Drool Tools" and to be fair Linux is kind of lacking in "Droolability".
It did Ok in the performance tests. Novell is still king, but I'll bet Samba'll get there and the distribution would have been vanilla - slightly elderly packages and optimised for your early Pentiums.
Deleted
the review docked linux because samba can only be configured by editing "a cryptic text file." in truth, samba is supported by linuxconf, and it ships with SWAT, which IMO is a pretty nice web-based config tool.
just picking nits..
chris
I'm not anti-GUI, except for configuration and monitoring tools. I want to look at the actual files in all their gory details. I want to quickly edit a config file in /etc instead of figuring out what that GUI tool is doing. Besides if I'm doing it remotely, I don't want to have to deal with --display whereiam:0 etc. Its easier to just edit the file. Plus, I know the formatting is like *I* want it. One of the things I *hate* about WinNT is that it's so hard to do things *without* the GUI tools.
So...Win2000 (-10) for difficulty in textual administration tools.
Criminalize spam and telemarketing!
Of course there's M$ help on usenet, but it doesn't compare in breadth, depth, or passion to Linux help. Your sarcasm is noted, but let's see you say this with a straight face.
;)
"The quality, speed, and accuracy of Microsoft help on usenet is as good as Linux help."
Go on. Say it. We'll wait. And wipe that smirk of your face
While we're at it, I explicitly challenge your right to FUD me on this. Fear Uncertainty Doubt. If you can name one software company more worthy of FUD that M$, I'll print out this page and eat it.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Nothing exists exept atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
blah blah blah....
It was implied...
Read the article.
They were tooting Microsoft as the best, Netware as second, then mention SCO, and then they mention Redhat at the very end. And they said RedHat was good enough to do basic simple things that werent important basicaly. hmmm. Sounds like they just dont have the guts to say it directly.
The author of the previous comment was likely referring to this major shortcoming when he used the word "faster." Though, in all fairness, the TCP/IP performance tests were ignored.
But W2K does have a FTP server included in the standard install.
Win2K ships with IIS, which has a FTP server included. All of your other points are valid, but please do your research next time before spouting off your mouth (err, keyboard).
We found the latest release of Red Hat's commercial Linux bundle led the list for flexibility because its modular design lets you pare down the operating system to suit the task at hand.
and
Red Hat Linux followed NetWare in file performance overall and even outpaced the leader in file tests where the read/write loads were small.
Still, there seems to be just a tad of W2K butt-kissing in the summary. W2K trails in performance, but is called "a good, general purpose NOS that can deliver enterprise-class services with all the bells and whistles imaginable." I think this is a little overstated when reading it in the context of the rest of the article. W2K does have the best GUI and friendly management tools, but bells and whistles are less important to me as a sysadmin than functionality and performance.
As it turns out Netware only had 4 parameters changed. Win2K had a bunch of registry editing and patches. At least they point out that "Registry hacking ranks right up there with kernel modifications, neither for the inexperienced system administrator."
NOTE -- forgot to select plain old text. Sorry.
I know this is long, but there are a lot of issues covered when speaking about OSes. Reply with your thoughts.
Anyone else notice the line that says:
You can configure Samba only through a cryptic configuration ASCII file - a serious drawback.
Personally, I use the web based configuration tool SWAT. Works well and is easy to use. It would be nice if journalists actually checked there sources.
Next we have this item:
Red Hat Linux comes with three manuals - an installation guide, a getting started guide and a reference manual - all of which are easy to follow.
This is all true but what about the online documentation? What about the man pages? On some items of Win NT you can spend days parsing through the help files, but almost all Linux questions can be answered in a man page or at least get you pointed in the right direction.
Next we have stability.
As with NT 4.0, Windows 2000 provides memory protection, which means that each process runs in its own segment.
That's all well and good but what are the average uptimes with Windows 2000. I use the latest beta release on one machine and have an average uptime of about 4 days. This is on a lightly hit server with ftp and IIS running. My Linux box has been up for 185 days and that's only because i needed to add a new NIC.
I don't mean to make this the standard Windows / Linux debate so let's include the others.
Novell -- great performance as they said, configuration is easy, documentation is lacking, uptime is average (my novell 5 box is up for about 50 days.) Plays well with Windows clients, not so well with others. All in all, they did an average job at reviewing Novell.
Sco Unix -- Seems to be a beast of an OS, but then again so is Win 2000. Stability is great (as in almost all UNIces). Doesn't play very nicely with others, but does have great documentation. They had a decent review of this OS all though I would have liked to have seen a focus on the nice backup utilities and the stability factor.
Bottom Line.
1. Win 2000 is fine if you are a Microsoft shop and have all windows clients and servers. The main reason to upgrade would be a need for Active Dircetory services. This is a very cool tool, but more than likely isn't worth the headaches that come with Win 2000. In other words, if you have NT 4, stay there.
2. Novell 5 -- Novell 5 offers some major benefits over 4.1 such as the pure IP implementation (IPX packets are encapsulated into IP), and overall speed and stability. NDS is top notch for managing network objects but still is lacking when it comes to playing nicely with other OSes. This is a good upgrade from 4.1. It's also a better choice currently for the Microsoft shops that don't need Win 2000 features.
3. Linux -- Ahhh! My obvious favorite. This OS has many things going for it. Open Source is the main thing, you guys know the arguements. Bottom line is that if a Linux product doesn't do exactly what I want it to do, I can play with the source to accomodate my needs. This sure beats waiting a couple weeks to a year for Microsoft to patch a bug (feature) in one of their products. It also means that security holes are found faster and are patched faster than a closed system like Novell or Microsoft. If you think security by obscurity works, then stop reading now!!! If your server isn't behind a firewall, Linux would be my number one candidate. If you are behind a good firewall, internal security is still very important. Somewhere between 70% - 95% of all breaches come from internal sources. So the features of Linux and Novell would need to be compared to make a final decision.
4. SCO Unix -- Stable, great documentation, somewhat feature lacking, average performance, but doesn't break. The main feature is that it scales well, but if you want a system that scales really well, look at SGI.
There's my opinion based on my administration experience. Any comments? Feel free to e-mail me. Hopefully its not to hard to decode my e-mail address.
Spam is "pork with ham, salt, sodium nitrite".
The pork is shoulder meat, which is of decent quality.
The gel is gelatin that separates naturally from the meat when it is cooked.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Linux is getting all the attention these days, but another Open Source OS - FreeBSD - should also have been included in the tests. Many large web sites (e.g., Yahoo) use FreeBSD, and it's networking implementation is solid.
Umm. None of the polls on IDG or CNN's website are at all useless because they make no attempt to get a good sample. The IDG/CNN/ZDNET/click-a-button polls rely on people to opt in with no regard to demographics and no attempt to make sure that the sample represents the population as a whole. Real polls make an attempt to get an accurate sample of the population.
Please, people, just say "untruth", "exaggeration", "outright lie", or whatever. Not all untruths are FUD.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I'd like to say that
(!RedHat == Linux)
If you don't understand that, then you just don't understand.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I find it particularly disturbing that the only mention of scalability in the main article is in relation to SCO's UnixWare, and yet the scorecard makes scalability worth 20% of the total score. 2000 & Unixware both scored 8 for scalability while Netware and RedHat scored 6. There was NO scalability category in the main review even though there was one for client administration (worth 5% of the total score). Call me a cynic, but the weight assigned to scalability deserves SOME writeup in the main review. From the scores, the ONLY thing keeping 2000 ahead of NW5.1 - and the only thing keeping UnixWare 'close' to RedHat is the scalability weight.
Just for the hell of it, I re-scaled the scorecard, reducing scalability's weight by 60% and increasing all other weights by 15%. The results were informative: NW5.1 @ 7.85, W2000 @ 7.75, RH6.1 @ 6.40, & UW7.1.1 @ 5.81.
I've read the comments on NWFusion's web site - it looks like there may have been a scalability section at one point, but I can't see it now. The only comment I could find was from the 'How we did it' page: "We evaluated the scalability of each NOS based on its symmetric multiprocessor ability, failover clustering support and load-balancing clustering ability." Sorry, what was that? Scalability was measured on 'ability' and 'support', not real-world performance?
This review's conclusions are seriously flawed...
The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life
the program they were using for configing netware
NWconfig, is just a simple text program like linux conf, and also like linuxconf you can run it remotely via rconsole (remote console).
NWconfig is a great program in my opionon, it allows you to edit everything on the server from what set of menus (with the exception of the NDS tree)
as far as NWadmin goes, its a windows app that interfaces with NDS, its only run on the client machine.
also there is a dos based version of NWadmin that can be run over rconsole if I remember, but its nearly impossible to use
It looks, and sounds, like they gave major points for "ease of use" aka point and click configuration and wizards.
And oddly enough, they don't seem to have included ease of tuning into their comments about ease of use. In order to get the (comparatively poor) results they got out of Win2K, they had to hack the registry as part of their tuing procedure. They comment:
I can't speak for anyone else, but that hardly sounds like "ease of use" to me.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I liked it where when they were investigating file sharing performance, and wondered if the write flag was being honoured, they could just grabbed the source to samba and checked. Why they didnt give RH points for that, I dont know.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Must have hit a nerve, eh?
"Kevin Mitnick, naked and petrified."
MS Tech: Thank you for calling Microsoft, where do you want to go today?
IDG: We are doing a benchmark report and Windows 2000 didn't score high enough, and so we'd like tips to increase your scores before we go public with such negative results.
MS: Ah, it must be the ultra-reliable write-through flag. We here at MS do not condone other scrupulous OSes that do not properly handle this flag, causing nothing but corrupted data and crashing your entire organization, not to mention knocking our second moon out of alignment as well.
IDG: Ah, very good. Thank you for all your help.
MS: You do also realize we have GUI admin tools, don't you? We would hate to see a report that doesn't cover this terribly important aspect. Shortages of further MS products have been known to occur, ya know.
And give LinuxConf a try, it the only config tool for Linux.
IDG: Okee dokey. We don't want anything that drastic to occur. Consider it done.
MS: And give LinuxConf a try, it the only config tool for Linux.
IDG: Thanks for the tip. We should get back to "testing" (wink-wink) again. Goodbye.
MS: And have a cheery day.
Very informative article, yet when I voted for my favorite operating system, I had to pick Red Hat Linux because there was no other Linux option.
It looks as if Red Hat and Linux are now synonymous, or at least to the media. Not that I have any (major) gripes against Red Hat, but Red Hat and Linux are NOT interchangeable.
The text of the article mentioned that Linux provides the ability to use the standard Unix tools in scripts to automate tasks across a network. As far as getting consistent system administration done quickly across a large network, that is much more useful than running a GUI for each one.
They mentioned scalability, and one important factor with scalability is how administration scales with the number of servers. I don't expect to see many benchmarks that do it, but I would like to see a real scalability test with 1, 10, and 100 server configurations. The ability to learn the details once, and then automate them out of your way is a big plus with a rich, mature CLI environment.
I don't mean to say that there is no place for a set of GUI system administration tools. The single server in a small business will be easier to maintain that way. The file server at home serving my machine, my wife's and my kids' would be easier as well. It opens doors at the low end of the scale, which represents a larger number of sites. If you are a captive of the GUI for every configuration task, it slows you down significantly as the number of servers grows.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
No rhyme or reason is needed. Microsoft fanatics will naturally select Windows 2000 as the best because that's what MS has been telling them is the best for the last 5 years.
-BrentRedHat got the top spot by far in the "preferred NOS" section. Is it a popular but poor OS? I don't think so. It's not surprising to find faults in various bits of Linux, but what'll be interesting is how quickly such faults are fixed.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Most of the stuff they were complaining about was the lack of GUI interface. That was their only real problem besides the fact that Linux had a little trouble handling users above 100. And I believe that aspect if being worked on now. And if you really want graphical interface, why'd they choose RedHat? Corel is more GUI oriented, the point of each distro is to be able to choose with one you want..from Debian all the way to Corel.
By far, Novell has created a great product that will be tough to beat, but I think RedHat was right up there with them. GUI interfaces are alright, but I'll take a console over it any day.
Slashdot poll: I make a new folder with:
1- Console, cause its faster
2- Right-CLick, cause I like to watch the leds blinking on my case for hours on end while Windows processes the pictures and every single thing listed in that stupid drop down list. Who came up with this idea???
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
In my experience, the 'advice' on Usenet regarding Linux is worth slightly less than you pay for it.
I wouldn't say Red Hat came in "last", because they weren't really rating them apples to apples. They said Red Hat was best for some things, Windows 2000 was best for others, and so on.
I actually thought the article was somewhat complimentary towards red hat. The benchmark they needed to run, however, was Quake3Arena servers on each. : )
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
I'm surprised that nobody has pointed this out yet: abortive closes ARE supported on Linux. They just aren't enabled by default, and that's a good thing.
Abortive closes are great if you're a client running a benchmark, but if you're a server, you could receive packets at a port from a previous connection that will now appera to be coming from a new connection! Not a good thing.
sigs are a waste of space
Redhat probably came in first in the poll because of all the slashdotters who went to read the article...
No, I read the article at six this morning, long before Slashdot posted this article. And even then, Redhat won at +40% with a significant lead over all the others.
Thats just what they want you to think.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
The cluster would lose if the gross hardware spec were close. (i.e. four K6-2 350's vs one dual-processor Xeon-600). Clusters have transitive and communicative overhead several orders of magnitude larger than SMP mobos, and so they are performance lossy. But the great thing about clusters is they have no end. I could make a cluster out of 20 P3-600's; I don't think we'll ever see a dodeca-processor SMP board.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Why? Why does Linux ALWAYS have to hide behind our "Well, we may not be as good as NT on P650s, but we can run on 386s!" ?! I mean, Yes, when I have a 486/P75/Other Old comptuer at home, I pop my Slackware CD in and I got a nice MP3 server / Firewall Box / Whatever, but when I try to convince my (PH)Boss that our new PDC/Web Server/Print Server should run Linux with Samba/Apache/LPD, he can come up with tons of documents (Including some non-FUD) saying that NT/Novell/Whatever will do a better job. Its great that we can run a nice box on a old computer, but wouldn't it make sense rather then hiding behind our "My P60 is faster then your P60" statements, concentrate our efforts in getting better performance with up-to-date hardware?
#endif
Yes, I know we do a fine job and all that. I love Linux. But it just peeves me taht zealots always fall behind this excuse instead of improving our current situation. Yes the 2.4.X kernels are coming out. Oh well. I think I am gonna get a 0, Flamebait rating on this one :)
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Also according to the fusinon poll results, the order of final points were:
Win2K 7.78
Netware 5.1 7.61
Red Hat Linux 6.35
SCO Unix 6.10
So, Red Hat did'nt finish last like the title suggested. However it did end up in next to last place. I guess it's good even to get on the list. To hedge the bets next time maybe we can get them to also include Mac file and print services, baynan, 3Coms old 3+ Open and IBM's Lan Manager under OS/2. *Grin*.
Never knock on Death's door:
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Any time you start the "My distro is better/Distro-X sux" rhetoric, you are waving the Troll Flag.
Do not be surprised when you are labeled as such.
I'm surprised no-one pointed this out, but then again, you have to read to the bottom of the article to see it.
They obviously have not installed SAMBA correctly, as SWAT has been part of the distribution for quite some time now.
BTW, I don't like RH and I don't use it anymore. It's much to restrictive. SuSE for the desktop, and Slackware for the server.
gleNn@gbOrmSpa.PgoAv.Mau
I would just like to point out some unnecessary UNIX glamorization. >
WRONG! Try TManager for BeOS. That is probably the most complete process config. tool I've ever seen. Not only can to change thread priorities, you can suspend and restart threads on the fly, kill them. Plus it give you a listing of all memory areas and images in use on a thread, all the semaphores being used in the system, and get this, the ability to change the count, or delete entirely a semaphore. Plus it gives you access to the BeOS debug server so you can debug a thread. As for monitoring tool. Windows has that too. Try using System Monitor. Not only does it give you access to more stuff than you'd care to know. (It gives you access to IPX packets per second, file system bytes per second and dirty data, disk cache misses, disk cache cycle times, transaction per second through the network client, etc.) Plus it lets programms or hardware install their own monitoring plugins. My AWE64 installed software that lets me know how much memory is availabe on the card, how many voices are playing, cpu usage from the wavesynth, etc. Plus its all in one place.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Now if only everyone would take IBM's lead and start posting links to actual documented research. I was very impressed with IBM's Java/Kernel benchmarking and research.
Plenty of projects, not enough developers...
As it should be.
By far the best tool for monitoring bandwidth etc. But for system monitoring, I'm not so sure.
Ahhh the mibs, the mibs.
Getting multi platform support for all the mibs is a pain.
Deleted
Slashdot will grow up and act professionally and responsibly, which woiuld be nice, since they are one of the most visible 'Linux' sites around - we represent Linux to a lot of people. It is too bad the article posters are so immature - even , or ESPECIALLY, roblimo, who is like 50!!!!
I would just like to point out some unnecessary UNIX glamorization. >
WRONG! You CAN do that in a non "*NIX" system. Try TManager for BeOS. That is probably the most complete process config. tool I've ever seen. Not only can to change thread priorities, you can suspend and restart threads on the fly, kill them. Plus it give you a listing of all memory areas and images in use on a thread, all the semaphores being used in the system, and get this, the ability to change the count, or delete entirely a semaphore. Plus it gives you access to the BeOS debug server so you can debug a thread. As for monitoring tool. As for monitoring, Windows has some nice monitoring software. Try using System Monitor. Not only does it give you access to more stuff than you'd care to know. (It gives you access to IPX packets per second, file system bytes per second and dirty data, disk cache misses, disk cache cycle times, transaction per second through the network client, etc.) Plus it lets programms or hardware install their own monitoring plugins. My AWE64 installed software that lets me know how much memory is availabe on the card, how many voices are playing, cpu usage from the wavesynth, etc. Plus its all in one place.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Actually, I would say that is low end for an enterprise server. Compaq would consider that configuration a departmental/workgroup server. If you want to compete in the big league with NT, Novell, SCO, Sun, etc., you have to take advantage of the big iron.
We just purchased back in the Summer almost that exact same setup.. Dual-450s, 640MB RAM, 5 9.1GB SCSI-3 10K RPM drives and put RedHat 5.2 with Kernet 2.2 on it. It runs web proxy/filtering and e-mail for about 8000 users. That server was less than $10,000 and would be considered low to mid range. Check something like Compaq's Proliant 7000 or 8000 for a true high end system.
Jason
"FORMAT C:" - Kills bugs dead!
First of all, it didn't score last, SCO Unix did. RH came in third out of four, but the overall point spread was very narrow -- There wasn't even as a two-point difference between the highest scorer and the lowest.
Second of all, part of the score wasn't determined by performance but by things like administration tools. Unix has always been weaker in those areas, and I think will continue to be, because unlike Novell or MS, Unix products aren't built with the management interface in mind. Which is fine with me. I only need two management tools -- bash and vi. Anything else is great if it makes life easier for me, but 90% of the time, just gets in the way.
--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
If only this were true. ;) There are thousands of enterprise-level Windows NT installations out there. Two jobs ago I worked for a company that has the largest private network on the planet (guess who). They were moving from Netware (4.x running in bindery emulation mode - real geniuses) to Windows NT. Last time I talked to an admin there they were almost totally NT.
Of course, they run their database, mail and web services under UNIX, but all file, print, and even desktop/application databases are NT based.
--
Oh, please.
Try a traceroute maybe?
Slashdot always took along time for me to load, also, and then I got a cable modem. Surprise! I get pages at about 150 k a sec from Slashdot.
Your problems have nothing to do with the OS Slashdot is running on.
how about YOU try configuring an identical box to whatever you are using with a T1, and see how it performs? Now that would be an interesting
real world benchmark.
You can't install SWAT with linuxconf (unlike the standard services, you have to manually update inetd.conf. Boo hoo.), so maybe that's their reason for ignoring it.
Of course, I'm really reaching here. SWAT is a great point in Samba's favour and they really should have featured it in the article.
Hands in my pocket
I should probably put some text in here so that my post won't get auto-moderated down for briefness. The subject is about all I have to say.
Wah!
This article doesn't refer to Red Hat as an operating system, it refers to it as a Network Operating System. There's a big difference. Linux by itself is not a NOS. Red Hat, OTOH, is.
HA HA (another beating for Linux, can it's reputation be salvaged?)
Fight spam: insist on the source! Can you imagine eating something that didn't come with an ingredient list? Why use an OS that isn't OS?
Ok, here is NT's ingredient list:
ingredient 1: 0
ingredient 2: 1
If you want to bash MS and/or NT you can say:
ingredient 1: printf("coucou\n")
ingredient 2: patch to correct ingredient 1, adds 2 features and 4 bugs.
ingredient 3: patch...
but given that other people already have done it in a better way I won'd do it again
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
I didn't moderate you down... but maybe I can help you to see why it happened. (Your post screamed troll to me when I read it too, and I try to be open minded)
Lets look at your post:
***As we all know, Red hat has been proven to be the worst of all Linux distro's.***
Hmmm...okay...The "As we all know" is a major no-no and starts you out on the wrong foot. Perhaps you should have said "It's my opinion that" because really you are just stating your opinion, not a proven scientific fact.
***Feeding of the week minded masses that would rather pay $50 for something because it comes in a 'pretty box'.***
Well okay... things have gone from bad to worse my friend. You have now just made a broad sweeping blanket statement about the people who buy RH.. along with some rather unfounded assumtions about those people.
Perhaps you meant to say something like "I feel that many people purchase RedHat just because it's popular and come packaged in a nice box" That's much less inflamatory and probably a whole lot closer to the truth.
****Red Hat truly is becoming Microsoft, not in there business practices, but rather in there mediocre software.*****
And finally you hit a home run with the standard comparison to MS. As MS is typically portrayed as the evil incubus anti-christ around here I'm not too surprised that this might be seen as an inflamatory statement. Perhaps you could have said "I believe that the quality of the RedHat distribution has suffered since they have gone big time, and their prime concern doesn't seem to be about the software"
So you see, it's actually what you said, along with your borderline pious attitude, that screams troll/flamebait. Perhaps a more well thought out, less angry post would be better received.
Sorry to waste the bandwidth, I hope this helps you with your next post.
Here's a copy of the e-mail I just sent to the authors:
I thought that your article was pretty good. However, I would like to
point out a few errors about Red Hat Linux in your article:
1) "Red Hat offers the standard Linux command-line tools for monitoring
the server, such as iostat and vmstat. It has no graphical monitoring
tools."
There are actually several. I am not sure which ones are installed in
which installation option, but the rpms are certainly on the CD, and would
be installed in an "everything" install.
Under GNOME there are several tools, all under the Utilites menu.
GNOME system monitor: shows cpu, mem, swap, and load average, as well as
diplaying the process table like top does. It has a graphic display of
resident sizes of processes as well.
GNOME stripchart: produces a stripchart of cpu, load, swap, net in, net
out and ppp usage, and is highly configurable.
Even if you have not installed GNOME, there are three generic X programs.
xosview shows load, cpu, mem, swap, page, disk and interupts. It supports
multiple processors. This is my personal favorite. You may need to enlarge
the window to make full use of its detail.
xsysinfo shows load average, load, memory and swap. It does not support
multiple processors.
xcpustate just shows cpu usage. It also supports multiple processors.
Of course, all of these programs can be displayed remotely using X.
2) "Linux has a set of command-line file system configuration tools for
mounting and unmounting partitions. Samba ships with the product and
provides some integration for Windows clients. You can configure Samba
only through a cryptic configuration ASCII file - a serious drawback."
This is just not true. You can configure Samba with LinuxConf. The samba
configuration tool is under Config/Networking/Server tasks/Samba file
server. Similarly, NFS can be configured under Config/ServerTasks/Exported
file systems (NFS). File systems are defined under Config/File Systems and
can be mounted and unmounted under Control/Mount&Unmount file systems.
I believe there is also a web-based configuration tool for Samba called
SWAT (Samba Web Administration Tool). I have never used it, but there
seems to be a man file for it on my system. Type 'man swat' for details.
I certainly hope that you will revise your article to correct these
errors.
Sincerely,
Simon Hill
http://www.metasystema.org/
Hell, yeah!!
LinuxOne is the best, I'm using it right now!!!
But then I'm the CEO of LinuxOne so maybe I'm biased....
Don't diss me or I'll open a dozen new Hotmail accounts and sic my "lawyers" on you!!!
I checked out your great link to storm front.org
,
and i discovered that you are a total piece of crap!!
And yes, I'm white. Just not bigoted, cowardly, scared and an example of why human kind should be eradicated. You fucking suck.
I hope you either figure out how to exist as adecent human,
or, preferably, DIE.
its probably too late, so die.
Let the kiddy admins and their point'n click GUI interface run their little server farms on cheap slow ass "Intel inside" hardware.
I'd like to see the test again on a bunch of 386s/486s with 8MB or even 4MB of RAM. I'll bet a lot of the other distros won't even install. Red Hat will.
Of course, little toy scripts like adduser are generally distribution specific.
Learn how to use vipw to add new users, and you'll be able to do it in any Linux and all the BSDs as well.
You forgot to mention LinuxOne! It's fairly common knowledge that LinuxOne the best, easiest to use Linux distro out there! Right? Can I get a "Hell, yeah!"
<DISCLAIMER> This is not flamebait. It's a joke, so point your moderation wand elsewhere.</DISCLAIMER>
- Rate File services as only 15%, and the network benchmark at only 10%. Bias: against Novell which whipped Win2K
- Rate the areas of Scalability (20%) Security(10%)and fault tolerance (10%) which were only discussed in a theoretical construct, and not fully thrash tested by security experts, etc.) where Netware has been. Bias: towards Win2K
- Install (5%) bias towards Win2K.
Okay follow me here:- I only install a Novell network once, and perhaps it's not quite as peachy-keen easy as Win2k. But it rates 50% better in performance (9.3 vs. 5.6 rating). So why the hell is the install given a value equal to 1/2 of the performance?
- Scalability doesn't necessarily come into play until extremely high loads are encountered. You can buy and install a second Netware server and still have a lower overall cost less than the price of the top-end MS servers (You wouldn't believe the license prices for Enterprise NT (required for "highly available" systems with RAID disks, etc.) Or a half a dozen midrange RH Linux servers.
- The security, Stability and fault tolerance figures are only in the lab, not in the real world like Novell, Linux, and SCO have already been.
So there you have it. Win2k does come out on top. But only if you cheat.Measure real world performance, proven stability, security, etc., and the score comes out more like #1 Novell for the biggest installations, #2 RH Linux for small and midrange, and a tie for #3 between SCO and Win2k. SCO for people who know better, and Win2k for PHB's who don't.
P.S. I changed the scalability figure to 10% and upped the value of the file/network portion of the test...Novell wins in a Landslide. RH still third, but Win2K is not much better, and the difference is 90% in the docs and utilities. ;)
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
...what a tremendous pain in the but Linux's NSF is, and how nicely NT's file sharing works, it is not a surprise for me. We moved alll our code science analysis computers to Linux, engineers live with NT. Linux is good for what it is good - but not for anything else...
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
The first half of the article was about how NT had better I/O throughput, both for large tranfers and while under load, than Linux. You can't say Linux is faster in this particular comparison.
Also, looks like cost wasn't a factor in this article. So you're left with "more reliable".
Now, if we add up the points like IDG did, NT comes out on top. Of course, you've already made up your mind in favour of Linux.
Hands in my pocket
Does useradd work with NIS?
Listen Pal, I don't know what 14.4 modem you're connecting with, but if it takes you 5 minutes for slashdot to load, chances are it's YOUR bandwidth problem, not an OS availability problem. For the record, my boxes run both linux and FreeBSD, both optimally well.
Help, I'm being repressed!
thanks. now maybe I can harass you since you are clearly a total piece of shit, judging by stormfront.org.
You ignorant loser.
Another problem is that they just weren't familiar with Red Hat Linux.
Among other things, they claim samba can be configured only through a "cryptic configuration file".
First of all, I wouldn't call smb.conf cryptic - second, Red Hat Linux includes both linuxconf and swat (samba web administration tool), both of which can be used as simple frontends for editing samba configuration.
Also, if samba is their *only* idea about filesharing (IMO both nfs and coda are superior), they must be joking.
And that's not the only inaccuracy...
Also, did anyone else notice when Windows 2000 failed miserably, they contacted Microsoft and tried to get it fixed while they did not bother to ask Red Hat or anyone else if there's really no frontend for samba configuration?
I wonder how much Microsoft paid for this.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
I'm supprised you didn't list gtop ktop or xosview. Now I'll grant you xosview isn't pretty but how many system monitors show IRQ's? I also found fault that they didn't use SWAT, AFAIK it's installed with Red HaT 6.1 but not enabled by default. If these factors were taken into account Linux probably tied with NetWare for first by their own tally. I just confused as to how they figured W2k took first after reading I expected it to be Novell, which I find reasonable b/c They have a great product.
Your Opinion=FUD. Read it. Read it again.
No, it's the java servlets that I wrote that he's trying out. Java == SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!
I mean, can't the test windows with NFS and lpd? Why is it they always compare "network" performance using Windows P2P and Linux running Samba?
On that note, what is the performance difference between NFS and Samba for file services?
How about the performance difference and load capability of lprng and Samba?
Just a thought.
I give them credit they at least wrote a unbiased article. But I am more than certain they didn't actually run the tests, but instead summed up the results from the student employee.
Don't believe me? Eat your heart out... http://www.cnl.ncsu.edu/contacts/Er, wrong. Windows 2000 has been widely available in various prerelease and/or beta stages for over two years. I've been running it as a server OS ever since it was called NT 5.0 beta 2 (a little over a year ago). Plenty of people have used Windows 2000. In fact, I'm typing this on a final release version Win2000 Pro machine.
--
(Big, frustrated rant ahead)
It really burns me when I see technical pundits talking about "enterprise-class" systems when they clearly have no idea what an "enterprise" is.
Here's a big, fat, spelled-out clue for them: "Enterprise" means more than just "really big". "Enterprise" means more than "lots of bundled pretty lights".
1. Enterprise systems have to be able to handle a tremendous load without sweating. This means lots of processes and lots of threads running smoothly at the same time. When overloaded, enterprise systems degrade gracefully.
Let me spell that out in caps -- ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS DEGRADE GRACEFULLY. They may refuse additional client connections, they may log error messages, but they may not EVER collapse under pressure. Anything less is not an enterprise system. It is a toy. Period.
2. Enterprise systems integrate with existing systems. A REAL enterprise often has legacy systems -- some of which have been running since before the new web developer was out of diapers. Companies offering enterprise solutions like to talk about how well their products work with your existing systems. Companies selling toys also want to help you with "updating", "migrating", or "replacing" your existing systems (which were working just fine before you strolled into my office, twerp). Consider that a red flag.
3. Enterprise systems stay up. In a real enterprise, rebooting costs money. Usually it costs BIG money. A company who doesn't understand that doesn't understand what an enterprise is. Beware -- toy-makers will try to sell you aftermarket add-ons for clustering, failover, or maintaing your "quality of service". Don't be fooled. You will pay more to maintain "quality of service" than you would pay to get a solid system in the first place.
I am so tired of magazines pandering to managers who think that they're running an "enterprise". Real enterprises already HAVE professionals to do these comparisons. They have no choice. In the long run, having a professional who is accountable is whole lot cheaper than trusting some twit at IDG, CNN, or ZDNet.
Now, with that perspective, I ask: do any of these NOS qualify as "enterprise-class"? If not, which ones come closest?
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
You got it. =) I think a more interesting test would have been some of the newer 2.3 kernels vs Win2k.
;), as the case may be, have UNIX-based clients, and running Samba, wonderful as it is, would be...well...stupid.
;)
We should all know by now that 2.2, despite being a generally efficient, well mannered and generally upstanding kernel (I recommend that you invite it to all your dinner parties), isn't the most scalable beast on the planet. Like they said in the article, after about 100 clients, it begins to fall apart. C'est la vie.
Another interesting test would be to see NFS performance. Sure, I understand that the majority of PHBs have large farms of Windows clients. However, for those of us who actually have a clue or have learned that Windows development is best left to the criminally insane (But only if you're sanctioned by the RIAA
Of course, IMHO benchmarks are the digital equivalent of a circus freak show. Kind of interesting at first, but with little bearing on reality. After you've seen the glue drip off the bearded lady (no offense to any real bearded ladies out there) a few times, the novelty wears off very quickly....
And, if the benchmark gets your feathers in a ruffle, just remember that we can wipe it from the history books once we've achieved world domination!
"What do you mean, invalid parameters? 9000Gigs of RAM and it can't answer a simple question!" -- Earthworm Jim
I'd say give it 3 to 4 weeks. All the suits will have leapt off the Linux Bandwagon as it tumbles down DVD Lawsuit Gulch.
Linus will be working with the newly merged Sun/Transmeta on the new embedded "Linux Virtual Machine" chips.
Richard Stallman, will, as always, be collecting his endowment checks at MIT.
Aparently this is not the land of free speech. Sorry about my opinion, how silly of me to think for myself. You must have missed the quote by the leader of the new black panther party concering his love of white people:
"We kill the women. We kill the babies. We kill the blind. We kill the cripples. We kill them all. . . . When you get through killing them all, go to the goddamn graveyard and kill them a-goddamn-gain because they didn't die hard enough."
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
RH Linux rated very well in most of their tests, maybe not first, but still good. A lot of the tools that they said were not available with RH certainly are. The CPU/mem usage graphical monitors that they said weren't available have been in the RH distro at least since 5.2. Other than that, they basically said that RH lacked "polish". Of course it does, you idiots. It's not a purely commercial OS with a few thousand programmers working on it to make it pretty. Jesus, look at how it works, not how it looks.
We were going to purchase an Ultra 1 running Netra or FW-1, which could have cost us around 3k-20k. How much of a price difference do you need, because there is a piece of deadweight PC (in our environment, cause we have win2k) versus a very useful workstation that is wasted doing NAT.
And the Linux community knows where our shortcomings are (multi-threaded tcp stack, higher fd lists, better SMP support) and they are getting worked on. But it's good to know that at the low end of the spectrum, Linux has the cheap and easy solution. Anything you throw a lot of money at is going to work better than something that recieves almost no money, on average anyway.
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Then your experience is sadly limited, non-existent, or restricted to questions of the "My Linux PC won't boot. What's wrong?" type (i.e., your questions have been phrased so badly that no one would bother answering them). Either that, or you spend too much time trolling.
As far as I can recall, I have never failed to find an answer on Usenet to any question I've ever had to ask about Linux, with a single exception (that being Samba configuration, which has never worked "out of the box" for me -- but 30 minutes or less of playing with the config file has always resolved even that, so big deal).
The quality of technical support available online for Linux from its users and developers is, quite simply, excellent.
Oh yes, nothing can beat the speed and ease of managing multiple stations than a GUI. Click on the cute little picture of one server, update some bit of info, repeat for each server.
/etc) a Linux system are confusing to the beginner, but they shine when you advance beyond that stage. Whether it's cvs, perl, python, etc you can do a multitude of actions that Windows just never will be able to. And likewise, these fly-by-night, quickie, here is all you need to know in one page because we know you can't sit down and read lengthy, boring reviews before making a decision and please click on our banner ads, sort of analyses will never know any better.
:)
That sure is faster than maintaining a CVS server that all your servers feed from via cron, and just commit your latest change. But that requires typing, ewww, zero points for flexibility. 10 points for MS, yay!
The simple text files lying all around (most under
Infinite flexibility, source code, custom tailoring to the tiniest detail, reprogramming apps to do exactly what you want, these do not make a bit of difference. Have a pretty paper clip show you how to hit the G key, and they'll scream with glee.
So far I've found
I'm forced to conclude that they have a point on the monitoring tools.
well maybe not when I stub my big toe, but I will sue them if I get cancer, since I go out and smoke everytime I reboot my machine/server.
You all see the little poll on that CNN article? I'm sure you did, we all love to take polls...but what is in a poll? IMHO, bullshit...
Polls are meant to be non-biased opinions on what a random grouping of people thinks about a certain subject. You have a take a sample of people that truly reflects what the average person things though (or at least the average network administrator). What we get is Slashdot Poll Fallout. We get a huge % of people that come from one site that supports more or less one OS (Linux in this case, note: I do like Linux, nothing against it). So we have 50% of the people voting for Red Hat on this poll at my last glance.
But, then I come across a VERY interesting stat: Windows 2000 is 2nd with 15% of the votes. Ok, now someone correct me if I'm wrong, but is Windows 2000 even out? How can ANYONE have a accurate view of how good a NOS until it has had the proper time to develop? NT, Linux, and NetWare have all had times to really develop in various area...but I'm talking years, not weeks. I know people who have the final release of it, but are we saying that within a 3-week period we have already deemed it a better NOS than Linux or even NT4? (I'm a great supporter of NT4 too)
I have used NT, Linux, and Win2k and I can say that there is no way anyone can say that Win2k is a better OS. Maybe it's the whole subjective ness of the question, but this poll is about which NOS you prefer because of it's props and slops. I can like the features of 2000, but a real network admin will prefer of an OS because it's proven history. It's gone through all the triads and tribulations of a NOS and survived. Give Win2k time to grow as an OS and really develop. Find out its true stability from real world situations and long term testing. Until then, let's not call it something that it's not...the 2nd most popular mainstream OS. Thanks for hearing my rant...
Randy Prince
"I am Jack's complete lack of suprise." -Fight Club
I read the article and maybe I'm missing something but it made no mention of any firsdt or last place overall standings. Why use these attention grabbing headlines when they have absolutely nothing to do with the story? Or maybe you guys are talking about some other story. Any way, as far as the article itself, it wasn't to technical but it did show that if you have a staff of incompetent netwotk admins. then your only bet would be to set up a Win 2000 server. If you ask me this is not a very good reason for choosing your NOS. I'll agree that setting up a UNIX box might at first be more complicated but it's the performance and reliability that counts when you're running a server.
Many of these so called "Showdowns" or "Benchmark tests" are very similar. They get a few OSs, run a few benchmarks and then make general statements about performance and usability. What I can't figure out is how can you do a NOS comparison without doing detailed tests on security and stability? This is just a publicity article for Win2K. Redhat Linux was probably "thrown in" to get someone to actually READ the article. And btw, if it was meant to be journalistically accurate and unbiased they probably should have waited for the release of Solaris 8 to do the test. God knows they waited on Win2K long enough!
I don't care what any of these benchmarks say, I've used Linux, BSD, NT, DYNIX, Solaris, AIX, and Novell in the Real World, and they ALL suck pretty much equally. Static performance benchmarks are the biggest load of shit ever to grace geek press - they simply have nothing at all to do with what happens when you put a server on a network and let users have at it.
I _still_ prefer linux, because, in the Real World, it is the easiest by FAR to use. If you're talking about REAL servers, then a GUI is _useless_, because the box itself is prolly a long ways away from you. What matters is TOOLS, and linux ships the tools. Perl, expect, tcl/tk, compilers, the friggin works, it's in there. Fuck a GUI, I want to automate my backups over the network, I want to do it for free, and I want it done in an hour or less. I cost my company an assload of money per hour, and I have better things to do with it than click widgets and reboot.
--
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Win2k can't even follow standards:
http://www.novell.com/advantage/w2k.html
traceroute to slashdot.org (209.207.224.42), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 gateway (172.16.128.1) 36.598 ms 30.336 ms 32.147 ms
2 f5-2.eth.gr-0.crane.pa.stargate.net (209.114.165.1) 26.342 ms 24.341 ms 24.253 ms
3 s3-0.ppp.cr-2.cc.pa.stargate.net (209.166.164.9) 22.562 ms 26.293 ms 25.689 ms
4 f0-0.eth.br-0.cc.pa.stargate.net (209.166.164.161) 21.704 ms 25.744 ms 24.200 ms
5 Serial3-1-0.GW2.PIT1.ALTER.NET (157.130.33.21) 26.690 ms 27.411 ms 26.370 ms
6 152.ATM2-0.XR1.DCA1.ALTER.NET (146.188.162.98) 34.205 ms 33.396 ms 30.502 ms
7 195.ATM10-0-0.GW3.DCA3.ALTER.NET (152.63.32.73) 30.73 ms 32.729 ms 33.612 ms
8 dn4-gw.customer.ALTER.NET (157.130.15.230) 33.237 ms 34.101 ms 35.286 ms
9 209.207.224.42 (209.207.224.42) 37.773 ms 38.91 ms 34.674 ms
Nothing wrong with my DSL line. I can watch lynx send the http request, make some coffee, come back and its done. I love FreeBSD, thats why I suggested malda do a test for a week and watch the system load. Don't forget FreeBSD has a multithreaded tcp/ip stack.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Learn how to use vipw to add new users, and you'll be able to do it in any Linux and all the BSDs as well.
Actually, I'm quite familiar with that, and whenever useradd is not there, that's just exactly what I do. And it works on any UNIX period, even Unicos :-)
I just figured that since the topic was more or less goof proof ways (compared to the various gooey interfaces) useradd might be safer.
a) Kerbos? KERBOS?? Good God.
b) Don't use the gui config tools, then. Seriously, infojack, what configuration are you trying to make that doesn't have a scriptable command-line equivalent?
c) It was a Network World Fusion article, reprinted by, but not written by, CNN. Did you even read it?
d) "They didn't do any testing, they did stuff." WTF?? Try checking out the "How we did [the testing]" link right on the page. Again, did you even read the article?
e) Score: -5, Woefully, and I mean woefully, uninformed.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
One part of the article I don't agree with was that you need graphs and chart wiz-bangs to figure out what your system is doing.
I was writing a PHP3 script on my machine and I accidentally created an infinite loop. Not realizing this I hit the refresh button on netscape and after a few seconds I heard the disk start spinning. The page should have been up by now, so I switched to a text console and typed top, apache had gobled up about 110M of memory.
I find that top displays information in a much easier to read format than NT4's task viewer. Other tools such as vmstat give quick access to any information I want. I've played with NT4's system monitor (??) that displays graph and other histories of various stats and find it more difficult to configure than poking through a man page for which cryptic letter combination from vmstat will tell me how many page faults I've had.
marotti.com
Um...think about it. 4,000 Slashdotters go visit the site and take the poll. Do you think they're going to vote for Windows? Bah. The poll is invalid until 4,000 Microsoft employees get their chance to spam it as well.
--
"enough preservatives to ensure a shelf life well into the next century."
/me scratches head.
I'm not entirely sure how you mean this... do you mean to say that spam will last until jan 1, 2001, or jan 1 2100, or jan 1 2101?
damn this "millennium" or "millennial" stuff confuses me...
They did everything they could to beef up W2k's performance: rerun tests, reset parameters, etc,. and then they simply put puff descriptions all around descriptions of its performance.
Did they recompile Linux to make it i686? No.
Did they retune it and Samba? No.
Did they compare W2K with SuSE, the Linux distro with the largest sales volume, worldwide? No.
A W2K puff piece?
Beyond a shawdow of a doubt.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Windows 2000 demonstrated poor write performance across all our file tests. In fact, we found that its write performance was about 10% of its read performance. After consulting with both Microsoft and Client/Server Solutions, the author of the Benchmark Factory testing tool we used, we determined that the poor write performance could be due to two factors. One, which we were unable to verify, might be a possible performance problem with the SCSI driver for the hardware we used.
Awful fishy to me that they actually consulted with others to figure out why W2K wasn't performing up to snuff in this test but they seem to have fiddled with the other OS's themselves for the other tests.
LRJ
Please don't flame this guy out of existence. He makes some valid points. There are undoubtedly a few who will want to respond, so do it in a clear, constructive manner, please.
This sort of test is just one more argument in favor of distros, particularly big commercial ones like Red Hat, shipping different editions tuned for different uses. Kind of like NT Workstation vs. NT Server. A home user who wants his machine mostly for word processing and web surfing on a dial-up account doesn't have the same needs as someone setting up a file server on a LAN. Of course the entire distro should ship in each package, but the default configurations should be different, and maybe the kernel could be tuned differently in each case. And the home user especially does not want to have to read a book to learn about how to set up his system - he wants to use it right out of the box.
At least with this scheme, when Linux performs poorly on benchmark tests we could always say they were using the wrong version.
And the brethren went away edified.
...they keep publishing pro-Microsoft articles and the polls keep indicating that Microsoft sucks. Remember their "Do you trust Microsoft?" poll - it was on a pro-W2k article about how M$ promises to put forth more effort to increase security and blah blah - well the poll told the real truth - people who use it know better than to listen to CNN's pro-Microsoft agenda. I have to say, they didn't say anything "Bad" about Linux, but after saying that Redhat (what about the other distros?) and Novell beat W2k hands down, it concludes it's article that W2k is king, and, well, (paraphrased) if you're running some fly-by-night business out of your garage or dorm, Redhat just _might_ be good enough for you. Sheesh - are they that afraid of M$ lawyers?
:)
:)
Of course, in retrospect, if it is not out and out financially rewarding to publish pro-Microsoft articles, it seems that it can be financially damaging to be over-critical. Freedom of speach doesn't exist anymore - express yourself and have a dozen lawyers stuff a lawsuit down your throat. At least their Linux bashing didn't occure really until the end of the article. I guess it's their way of saving their butts - they basically said "W2k really sucks in relation to Linux and Novell, but it's the best in relation to Linux and Novell" - it saves them from having to post a retraction later by including one with the article...
BTW - I've been watching the poll - for every 10 votes on W2K, Redhat gets 100. I think the internet is the worst thing to happen to Microsoft - before you didn't know if your problems were just your configuration errors or real bugs - now that people can communicate in mass, it seems that there is a general concensus that Microsoft really does suck and it's not my fault or my configuration error.
But Microsoft does have it's good side - it's something to compare Linux to and gloat.
oh yeah. Good point.
I wonder how many people believed in this and it wasn't true.
But that doesn't matter to you. Does it?
Ktop and xosview are, last time I checked, the only graphical monitoring apps that give independent load graphs for each CPU on SMP systems. Which is good for proving to yourself that Q3Arena SMP support is broken.
I don't remember the exact ingredients either, but I'm pretty sure that they included "mechanically seperated poultry product."
Mmmmm...
[Seoman] "A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking."
Prize= best NOS. A few things: -Linux is recognized as a valuable solution for any network -Linux and Novell have pushed the envelope, and MS responded-- to push the envelope back at us. -MS and Novell will not have another release of their software for at least 2 years. I am unsure of SCO, but that means Linux will have two (2) years or less to run right past their competitors. Linux will have a journaling file system soon, gui and non-gui tools will flood the market as people see the need, and services throughput will increase with each release of a better kernel. -Print Services will improve if Corel keeps its promise to R&D new printing APIs. -Realize Linux is in the market against all NOSes. This includes MS Win2k, Novell, the rest of the *nix's out there.... ....this means the envelope will continued to be pushed, and before we know it, Linux will be touted as more scalable, reliable, and faster than any other system out there! (take note, Sun) -All of this is FREE as in the beer I can't get for free! --Thank you to all the people who have worked their asses off for a better solution. **Even if Linux 'loses' the 'war', it doesn't matter-- it has forced others to make a better product**
You say that "Red hat has been proven to be the worst of all Linux distro's". Where can I see proof? I am not arguing the point. I am currently trying do decide which distribution to use. But I have been unable to find any good comparisons. And a listing of distributions with vendor propoganda blurbs is not a "good comparison". See http://www.linux.org/dist/english.html for such an example. So where can I find a resource that compares the various distributions?
I started wondering what they were trying to do when they said they running the tests with the write through option set so the file system cache was bypassed. Three of the four systems have journeling file systems, and the files are on a RAID. RAID performance is horrible for small transfers. The said they also ran the tests using the file system cache. They provide absolutely no throughput results for the file system tests, but do mention that the NT results were lower than expected. They mention that it might be because of the drivers for the Compaq RAID controller.
The next issue is the performance difference between writing through the cache, and utilizing the cache. They said NT performed 20 times better using it's cache. This doesn't surprise me. Small writes to RAIDs aren't very efficient. The fact that Novel only improved 30%, and Red Hat Linux only 10 to 15% is surprising. Either the RAID is configured in a very strange way, or the test software has some problems. I don't believe that Novel or Linux has that poor of a file system cache. It also seems strange that SCO's performance didn't change. The reason the article gave was SCO's journaling file system, however NTFS is also a journaling file system. I seems strange, but I really don't know anything about SCO.
If they provided some throughput numbers from some of their tests it might be possible to make some sense of their report.
They did provide some numbers from their TCP transaction tests, however these results are even less convincing.
Their test configuration used Intel Pro 100+ NICs. The said they used 4 in the "control machine", I'm assuming they also used 4 in the server they were testing. There results showed the NT box running at 438.199 Mbits/sec. If they're only counting data going in one direction this is simply impossible. If they are counting both directions of a full duplex operation it's still not very believable. Even half this number is not very believable.
The only thing I feel safe in deducing from this report is that the testers aren't very good at presenting their information, and possible arent any good at setting up anything close to a realistic test.
...about 190 SCO employees (as of 15:30 EST) read CNN
Microsoft will release service packs of course (and probably charge for them) >/i>
An old college buddy of mine who works for M$ (and I've always learned to take what he says with a grain of salt) says that SP1 for W2K is ready for deployment on their website immediately after the official launch date and that OEMs already have SP1 in their hands. Anyone out there able to confirm this, or is my source just blowing smoke at me?
Sorry to inform you pal, but Slashdot
is tabloid for nerds, stuff that attracts morons.
Free Slash !
"But if you need an inexpensive alternative that will give you bare-bones network services with decent performance, Red Hat Linux can certainly fit the bill."
Then again, for what you'd want to do on a P75 with 16 MB, a default NetBSD install would be just fine.
Hands in my pocket
Interesting that Win2k beat linux in every category on that table. I didn't realize that from reading the article.
I think what our friends at CNN meant to say was:
...except Microsoft. They're okay. They provide support...
1) There are *too many* graphical monitoring tools for Linux.
Therefore,
2) It's too confusing. I bet there are text tools. No one on Unix would use graphical tools...
3) If we told the truth, we'd lose our "Microsoft Journalistic Objectivity", and get shunned by the other trade rags. Oh no!
4) We're really incompetent to review anything but Windows, but we'll pretend we can do it to sound smarter... And we wouldn't want to actually *ask* anyone else for help.
Finally, for those curious about the link / screenshot, I'm running a modified Redhat 6.0. That is, it's somewhere between RH6.0 and RH6.1, and also supports the freaky network stuff my university (NCSU) uses for networking. It's neet. And I was running DOSEmu (Fire demo) for the CPU cycles, and a Scheme interpreter (essentially doing 6^6^6^6, for the swap). Gtop is a pig, I like xosview and xsysinfo.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Because linux is mostly developed by hobbyists who don't have dual pentium IIIs with hardware raid controllers and multiple ethernet cards.
Redhat probably came in first in the poll because of all the slashdotters who went to read the article...
Ask Terry Lambert why IBM bought Whistle instead of a Linux company. Or how it treats the GPL even now.
The reason why IBM is holding Linux at arm's length -- and so many other companies give it lip service but are hesitant to integrate it into products -- is the GPL. It's a license motivated by spite, and its entire raison d'être is to put companies out of business and destroy programmers' livelihoods.
Folks from at least one of the companies you mention above have told me frankly that they tolerate the GPL because they perceive jumping on the Linux bandwagon as important to their short-term business opportunities. But at the same time, they believe it's necessary (and I think they're right!) to "firewall" their IP against the GPL.
By adopting the GPL, you're making yourself an enemy rather than a true ally. Some of these guys will sleep with the enemy if they must. (That's why they've gotten involved with Microsoft -- to their peril!) But if you really want their help, it is best not to do that. Don't adopt a license whose purpose is to stab them in the back, and you'll get their full support. And the support of folks like me, who won't touch GPLed code both as a matter of principle and as a practical matter. If there's any alternative, we won't run GPLed code.... And we certainly won't contribute to it. We believe, very strongly, that it would be unethical to do so.
--Brett Glass
Please... the point about this was that
Linux/Unix has a much (repeat MUCH) better handling of the command-line interface.
This interface has been forgotten in Windows,
and is very poor, and contains very little
improvement from the old DOS-style.
In addition, most of NT's configuration is stored
in a large and unreadable "registry", which is
a big pain trying to automate, if your specific
task is not covered by the GUI.
Shell-scripting lets you automate just about
everything under Linux/Unix.
While I agree that this means a higher learning curve, it also scales better with knowledge
and work.
You seriously can't compare text-interfaces in
Unix and NT. NT's is a joke.
you can't just go and buy a redhat cd and base your opinion about linux on that. everyone who *works* with linux knows that a redhat out of
the box is not what you need fo a production server. the poll allows choosing from redhat, maybe add an option "linux" as well?
screw off, troll
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
FreeBSD *was* tested with Samba (this was in the FreeBSD 2.x timeframe just after the Mindcraft benchmarks - not with 3.x).
:-).
It did about the same for SMB fileserving as Linux did. I was dissapointed as I would have loved to get an Intel Open Source based rebuttal to the Mindcraft benchmarks and I didn't care if it was FreeBSD or Linux. I was pushing to get the tests done, and had FreeBSD done much better I would have pushed PC Week to do a Samba+FreeBSD test. Remember, I'm promoting Samba, not an OS
Unfortunately, at least with FreeBSD 2.x the TCP stack was also very single threaded in the kernel.
Things look *much* better with the 2.3.x Linux kernels, and I hope they improve in the same way for the *BSD's also !
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
In RealityLand, Linux "service packs" ie kernel point releases come out much more often than Windows SPs. (The fact that they contain more new features than SPs does not change the fact that they are essentially SPs.) In fact if SPs came out less often, MS would get shat on right here for being too slow. And Linux releases fix bugs that were known at the time the last version was released just like SPs do. That's because everybody who professionally develops complex software knows that those who claim to get *all* the bugs out of a product of any complexity before shipping either ship obsolete software, are ignorant, or are liars. Instead you should test until you are sufficiently confident that the product is at a shippable level of quality for its application, and you are confident that you know all the major issues that you haven't got time to fix, so you can document them and users can work around them. The space shuttle's control software is reputed to have several severe bugs in it, but since they are well known and documented, they can be worked around. Fixing them would involve too much time, money, and (mostly) risk to be worth doing. And the software does its job just fine. What should be criticised is shipping with inadequate testing or serious known but undocumented issues. If the bugs in a SP or release are serious enough that they ought to have been fixed or documented already, they can be reasonably criticised. But simply shipping with bugs is not anything anyone should be embarrassed about, in almost any circumstances. Flame away.
I don't really think xload even qualifies as in the same ballpark as the NT monitoring tool. Hell, this thing will tell you everything from the number of threads running to the number of disk cache misses.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Linux FUD. Prove it.
Uh Windows 2000 has no remote management?
Please explain what MMC, Telnet, and Terminal Services are?
But on the actual rankings, which seem to elude your supperiour reading comprehension, Novell comes in first. So while it is admitted that RH is supperior with fewer clients, they didn't actually "come in first" in any catagory.
This clearly isn't true. Scores were granted in areas such as (direct quotes) "useful management interfaces" and "functionality and ease of use". These are subjective not objective. In order for a comparison to be truely objective, it needs to be based on numbers over which there cannot be dispute, ie, benchmarks. They ranked these OSes on superficial and subjective criteria and frankly, I disagree. I think that in Win2k you sacrafice functionality in favor of ease of use. I think the inverse is true in the case of RH. If I were to rate your intelligence subjectively based on your previous post, I'd have to say that you're an idiot. Objectivity may prove otherwise. Who knows.
Sincerely,
Ryan Taylor
Oh, yes it's the evil RMS trying to destroy "Everything We hold Dear in the World". Richard Stallman hates babies and pisses in the pool whenever nobody's looking. He is by all means the worst scourge the earth has ever seen. Will you GNU/Linux weenies not realize this until Herr Stallman marches you to your deaths in the ovens (who's temperature is controlled by computers running SPI's Debian GNU/Linux, with a particularly evil version of LISP used to write the control routines!!!)
You are free to re-write every bit of the GNU code, and make your own GNU-FREE* linux distro. See you in 10 years.
* as in beer and/or speech, its up to you.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
This is just a guess:
Is it possible, that the (journalled) Windows NT
Filesystem is poorly designed or implemented in W2k and uses [too many] synchronous writes?
A few days ago I've read about Sprite's (later
4.4BSD, now NetBSD) Log-structured File System (LFS, see http://www.hhhh.org/perseant/lfs.html).
LFS is specially designed to speed up writes,
so the paper I'v read discusses them a lot...
2) How soon can a technical problem be fixed?
3) What software will it run?
4) Will it be around for long?
5) Can you purchase it?
For more notes on #4, check out this article on ZDnet.
-----
Want to reply? Don't know HTML? No problem.
No Zen is good zen
I am a newbie in linux. To be fair, there are times that newbies don't get answers in newsgroup. It seems that people are losing patience with newbies :(. Please do not do that. It will only drive the newbies away. And I myself has ask questions regarding MS OS in newsgroup before and do get replies.
They did point out some real problems with Linux, especially the part about it stopping for short periods. I've seen this happen and it is annoying. It's caused by the write-back cache getting full and blocking disk reads until it finishes writing out the data. I know the disk cache structure is changed in 2.3.x, but does it solve this problem?
IMO both nfs and coda are superior
How did you arrive at that conclusion? The general consensus seems to be that NFS on Linux still sucks badly (security problems). OTOH, in my own experience Samba is pretty reliable. And all the commercial sites I've seen that use Linux as a file server use Samba rather than NFS. There must be a reason for that.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I have fast, low ping dsl on a fast machine and opening a new nested slashdot topic takes 30-60 seconds. Perhaps if they would overcome their embarassment and RELEASE THE SOURCE someone could fix the profound inefficiencies in it.
Look at the report summary:
If you want a good, general purpose NOS that can deliver enterprise-class services with all the bells and whistles imaginable, then Windows 2000 is the strongest contender. However, for high performance, enterprise file and print services, our tests show that Novell leads the pack. If you're willing to pay a higher price for scalability and reliability, SCO UnixWare would be a safe bet. But if you need an inexpensive alternative that will give you bare-bones network services with decent performance, Red Hat Linux can certainly fit the bill.
So, if you're looking to drop a bunch of cash on bells and whistles, get Win2K. I don't think we can really hate Novell, and SCO UnixWare is sort of a cousin.
What this review points out is, once again, what the Mindcraft Review pointed out: Linux is not 100% read for high-power, high-speed, prime-time major network server use. It IS getting there - look at the stuff that's popped up since then! - but more work is needed.
The bright side is: how many people are going to look at this, grr, and get to work on fixing it? That's the good side of FUD reports - gets people off their butts and trying to make better.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
Graphical monitoring tools coming soon...
I know for sure that Halcyon is porting their monitoring tools to Linux. They make SNMP monitoring software for your OS/apps/databases/whatever, and it all runs with Sun Management Center
You can check here to see when the software will be released, or send them a note if you'd like to be informed by email when it comes out.
Now's you chance to let them know how strong the Linux market for this stuff is.
Later,
Mike
Whats even more funy is that acording to Novell, Microsoft demands disabling all disk caching if you are running active directory.
Sorry, but you and Novell are spreading bad information. Disk caching is only disabled for those drives which store the Active Directory information and log files. Since any sane administrator would put the files being served on a drive which is separate from log files and operating system files, this is a complete non-issue.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
This review seems to be directed at those who need a "quick and dirty" networking solution, which doesn't really give enough credit for things like Linux's rapid improvement/development cycle and the variety of useful freely available apps, as well as the availability of source code. :)
Cases in point: it sounds like they were just using RH 6.1 out of the box, using the pre-compiled binaries. The results may have been different if (a) they simply upgraded all of the packages via RPM or (b) they grabbed the most current (stable) source code for the kernel and the apps they were using and compiled them themselves. Secondly, they said that RH doesn't come with many monitoring tools. True, but many are available simply by going to Freshmeat and searching for "monitor" or similar. But they did mention Linux was customizable, so at least they got that right
Actually, the deal is that the were only evualting tools that the vendor included with their products. Too most people 3rd party tools aren't valid. You've got to get everything from Microsoft, Baby!! That's what Microsoft has been heralding for a long time, and people have been buying it hook, line and sinker. This is why IE, AD, Visual Studio, the registry, SQL Server, Exchange, and others are "better". If it's in the MMC, then it's "good", otherwise it's a crappy third-party tool.
Not surprisely, Linux has the opposite methodology. Everyone is not only welcome to innovate, everyone is *encouraged* to innovate. When everyone chips in parts to the complete system, then everything is "third-party" and then people who bought into MS marketing thinks that most everything is not "part" of Linux, and that all Linux provides is "file" based interfaces. Yeah, the VI interface, Baby!!
-BrentFunny how W2K comes in third in file performance, short TCP tests, doesn't interoperate with anyone else, and has no written documentation, yet still seems to come in first and get the award.
/proc filesystem for use in automatic scripts.
/usr/doc directory with notes on every package in your system, man pages, info pages and a complete set of html based HOWTO's that describe in easy to understand terms how things work and how to configure them to work the way you want.
By their own admission Netware either beat Microsoft hands down or tied with Microsoft in all but the long TCP test. And funny how they only looked at optimizing _W2K_ when it did unexpectedly badly on a test. They probably could have modified Netware to do much better on the long TCP test if they had cared to. Can anyone say Netware got screwed?
And as far as Linux coming in last, what a crock. Linux came in first on short file writes, and short TCP writes. Linuxconf was given short shift considering that the underlying text mode of configuration is still available remotely from anything that supports telnet. And if they wanted a little more performance they could always just turn off X and get a few extra cycles that way.
For system monitoring under Linux try typing 'xosview'. This has been a standard tool for as long as I can remember and is much more responsive than anyone elses monitors. Not to mention the hundreds of other tools that are available. Not to mention that all of this information is also available through the
And top shouldn't be overlooked either. With its fine grained ability to monitor and modify process priority on the fly it is the best tool in my book. Under top I can see when Netscape is growing out of control and kill it. I can find the processes which are taking all the processor and turn down their priority so the rest of the system gets its fair share. You just can't do this on non *NIX systems.
For managing users across machines, Redhat comes with NIS. Sure, it has its problems, but once you get it set up and running, it works like a charm. And *NIX boxes are the only ones that will map in the users home, utility and share directories to any *NIX box that the user logs into. This has the effect of the user getting their own environment and files no matter what workstation they log into. This just isn't possible under Netware or W2K. Not that the testers are even aware of this capability, as they have obviously never ran *NIX before.
Linux has file and print services for Netware, Windows, Mac, and *NIX. It is easy to configure a single Linux box to act as a file and print server for all four networks at the same time, while not having to load four clients on each of the users workstations. We all know how well loading competing network clients on a single workstation works (In case you have never tried it, not very well).
Stability and fault tolerance? I like how they talk up Microsoft, even though none of W2K's features are actually being used by anyone. Including Microsoft itself. For anything mission critical to Microsoft they use *NIX or mainframes. Hotmail runs Solaris and *BSD, not W2K. Because W2K doesn't scale anything like *NIX.
As far as documentation, they neglect to mention the fact that you also get a
I am sick and tired of these people rating software and saying that something is bad because it is a command line utility. This, in and of itself, doesn't make a utility bad. In fact, it is relatively easy for command line utilities to have a graphical shell written for them(xcdroast anyone), that still allows you to use the underlying command line tool in scripts and the like. I don't care how easy a graphical tool is to use, it is not as flexible as a command line utility and _someone_ has to be their to fill in the blanks and press ok.
Command line utilites are only cryptic if you haven't read the man page. If you haven't read the man page you shouldn't be playing with a tool on a production box, graphical or command line.
And they didn't even have catagories for the areas in which Linux truely shines; development tools, scripting languages, shell environments, programming language support, and internet services.
-- Never make a general statement.
While we did not probe these NOSes extensively to expose any security weaknesses, we did look at what they offered in security features.
"Offered" as in "claimed." Well, that's a relief - we all know how forthcoming M$ is about it's OS security. Can you say, "whitewash" boys and girls? No one cares about your opinions on security, CNN - test it or shut up and leave it for the experts.
They very carefully didn't mention how long you can keep alive a Win2k box, compared with a *NIX or Novell box. They didn't mention how long it takes M$ to patch security flaws. They didn't mention tech support ($500/minute at 1-900-micro$oft, or free on usenet). They didn't mention software cost, or Microsoft's gouging with it's new license structure. They didn't mention what hardware they tested on. They didn't mention what hardware you need for an acceptable install of each OS (e.g. 3x more power just to run the oh-so-pretty Win GUI).
I guess you can't expect too much from CNN, eh? Sad how many people will read this and not think about any of the unmentioned issues.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Why no overall "plays nice with others" score? Well, it's because this isn't a benchmark that's intended to be the end-all, be-all of all benchmark tests. Of course they have to leave a lot of stuff out since operating systems are so complex, that if you were to test every single aspect of them, you would need an entire site, not just one published article, on how they work.
:) But seriously, those things probably wouldn't be an issue if they had a UNIX admin do the test, somebody who was used to not having a graphical front end. In that case, maybe Win2000 would have ended up on the bottom.
:)
Besides, different people have different priorities - you'll notice how Redhat got slagged on the fact that some of their tools don't have graphical front ends, and some of them like linuxconf do "evil" things like resize to be larger than the size of your display. Horrors!
The point is, that when you release a benchmark on something as complicated as an OS, you're going to miss a lot since there's too much to cover, and you're also going to be a bit biased by nature of the fact that the guy doing the reviewing probably isn't a seasoned professional on all of the OS's simultaneously. From the sound of the article in fact, he's probably a windows munkey.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
The function of an OS is as follows (as defined in a CS OS class):
All of these functions are provided in the kernel, although it may be argued that a small set up utilites is also necessary (insmod, ps, mount, etc.). However, I serously doubt the kernel and few required utilites is changed from distro to distro. RedHat is a distribution of the Linux OS. It is simply a set of utitilites and applications that is packaged with the OS. RedHat itself is not an OS.
Everyone clear?
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
They only reviewed Intel OSes and complained if tasks x,y, and z weren't accomplished with help from a GUI.
Real enterprise OSes such as OS/390, OS/400, HP/UX and Solaris - non PC, non-toy OSes - were notably absent from the list. I guess these fall into the "other" category I voted for in the poll. Still, I never saw one real enterprise OS even so much as mentioned.
Strangely, an as-yet unreleased OS with a nice GUI was mentioned: Win2K.
"clickety-clickety-click. Ooooo! See? I can run an enterprise!!!"
-M
Well, this article tells us everything that we already knew to be true & didn't really offer much insight. Sure RedHat 'came in last' but it was up against some tough competition. Win2K is the easiest to use (GUI-wise), Novell is by far the fastest, SCO is solid, and Linux offers a very good balance of everything at an affordable price. I don't see this as a 'bad' article for the Linux community at all.
Linux has poor support for multiple (load balanced) network cards; but we already knew that. Nobody I know slaps multiple NIC's into their servers anyway. If you really need that 'width you go with a gigabit card. Apparently the only use for a multi-nic configuration is if your doing a 'benchmark' for a thinly veiled MS marketing campaign.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
We definitely need graphical network monitoring tools. I just can't hack it with the command line stuff because I can't get my head around the documentation for it all - you need to be a TCP/IP expert to get anywhere with it.
For example, it would be nice to have a graphical tool which would dynamically display the traffic on an interface, including any combination of fields in each packet as specified by the user in an onscreen dialogue. It would be nice to be able to monitor DNS requests and see the address and host name returned. It would be nice to be able to graph things like socket usage.
It occurs to me that maybe the TCP/IP stuff in Linux hasn't received a lot of attention because most of the mindshare involved doesn't really exist in the Linux community. The whole thing was brought over wholesale from NetBSD. That would probably also explain why we're still waiting for a multithreaded IP stack.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
They didn't come in last in _ANY_ of the benchmarks. Windows 2k did however come in last in 1. Novell has been doing NOS for decades... Linux will catch up. Novell CORP, or Microsoft CORP will never be able to hire enough programmers to equal the programming power to the OpenSource community(tm).
Its a fact. I want to see this poll done, and I am sure it will be, in a year or two.
PimpSmurf
Stupid people do stupid things... Smart people outsmart each other... --System of a Down
As we all know, Red hat has been proven to be the worst of all Linux distro's. Feeding of the week minded masses that would rather pay $50 for something because it comes in a 'pretty box'.
:)
Its sad really, that so many people are going to leave there computers wide open to attack and stuff, simply because they go for the 'idiot' option.
Red Hat truly is becoming Microsoft, not in there business practices, but rather in there mediocre software.
Long live debian
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Red Hat != Linux, and we all know this. Red Hat is definately not the best Linux distro, and it is unfair to peg Linux in general with Red Hat's faults.
Now despite this, Red Hat was given an unfair shake. First off, this article gives little detail on how Red Hat was set up. I seriously doubt they installed the latest Kernel or did much with any of the configurations.
Now, it seems from the article that in raw network performance, Novell and Red Hat did much better than Windows 2K.
But then they bring in all of this information about "interface" and suddenly Windows 2K is made the winner because the editors liked the way Windows 2K's administration was set up. Quite a subjective thing to base a claim that W2K is the best Network OS, if you ask me.
I don't even see from the editor's comments how Windows 2K was the clear winner. It seems to me that if there was any clear winner from this it was Novell. I wonder if Microsoft sponsored this little test in any way?
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Just a small point, but... does anyone else get rather annoyed with the way RedHat gets lumped in with SCO? Linux is a Unix-based OS, so is SCO (loosely-speaking: you know what I mean, to hell with the UNIX(TM) crap); RedHat is NOT an OS, just one way of distributing Linux. Full kudos to RedHat; but it is getting more and more common to use the distribution name as though it meant an OS, which it doesn't. SCO and Linux can be compared; SCO and RedHat can't: it's apples and oranges.
I didn't notice this in any of the other comments, so I thought I'd comment on it. =-)
/etc/inetd.conf and restart inetd. As they mention that RedHat (and Unix's) ability to turn on/off individual ports, they have at least SOME understanding of this file and its purpose.
/usr/doc (which will ~100m on my install). These include not only basic installation and maintenance, but basically everything most admins ever wanted to know in a reasonably readable format. Add to that that almost all of it is availble in an HTML browser window, something that they marked against W2K.
First, they state that there is no GUI for Samba with RedHat. This is simply wrong. There is one that is built into LinuxConf. Not only that, though, redhat includes SWAT -- all that is needed to turn it on is to edit
Second, they mention that RedHat lacks any graphical monitoring tools (and they only mention vmstat and iostat). RedHat includes several different graphical monitoring tools including xosview, xsysinfo, and gtop. That being said, I don't believe that the NT monitoring tools give quite the depth of information that iostat, vmstat, and sar give.
Third, they mention W2K's active directory and the ability to manage it inside it's MMC. RedHat linux ships with OpenLDAP, (ADS is basically a superset of LDAP) as well as the ability to configure it, add/delete users, etc. in LinuxConf. Not only that, but RedHat ships with a pam module so that you can authenticate against an LDAP server (as well as a RADIUS server, SMB server, etc. with unshipped pam modules).
Forth, documentation... RedHat not only ships their three modules, but it ships a copy the LDP's list of HOWTO's, the Apache Manual, the PHP Manual, Man pages, as well as
Lastly... Since when did RedHat only cover the "Bare-bones network services"? Generally speaking, the problems I've run across with RedHat installs is that the number of network services installed FAR exceeds the needs of the system in question. It includes SMB file/printer sharing, Netware file/printer sharing, Appletalk, etc. It includes a Web and FTP server, allows for remote admin, etc. etc. etc. (I'm sorry for pointing out things ya'll already know... but this really strikes me as a poorly researched article that judges the contestants in a very subjective way.)
In this forum, I believe the reference to Red Hat is what's considered a religious flame.
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2000/0 124ipv4.html
Scalability counted for 20% of the total, NT scored 8, RH scored 6. Probably due to the problems mentioned about the RH system under load
Security was 10%, NT got a 9 here. Maybe due to the encrypted file capabilities in NT2000?
I think they could have used a little finer grained ranking mechanism. But, overall it looks like a fair evaluation.
What I would like to see is a comparison of NOS's on mid to low end systems. I think that is where Linux really shines, in the small office all-in-one server.
> Red Hat offers the standard Linux command-line tools for monitoring the server, such as iostat and vmstat. It has no graphical monitoring tools.
Im no GUI lover, but try "gstripchart" -- Gnome stripchart plotter
> Red Hat Linux doesn't offer much in the way of client administration features. You must control local users through Unix permission configuration mechanisms.
If you must have GUI, this can be done graphically, too
> As with NT 4.0, Windows 2000 provides memory protection, which means that each process runs in its own segment.
Yeah, Ill bet
I get we came in last because thats what the article "implied" by its summary. Since I *always* rely on CNN as the most balanced of all news reporting agencies holding itself to the highest standards in journalism, I was kinda suprised by this article. In short, it says all of them are good. Sez w2k has all these neato keeno features, and redhat has'em too, just not as cool. Sez w2k is better than NT, and rh is good too, just not as good, better at some things, but w2k is still cool. Netware is real fast, but w2k is better, thought not as fast, but we may have made a mistake in how we set it up. And All this other *crap*. The article is worthless. It goes on to state some points of view that I also share, is pretty kind to all, but basicly wraps up with RH is okay if you are a tight-wad and cheap-skate and only need skeletal services and can't afford to play with the big dogs. What a bunch of non-sense.
The general consensus seems to be that NFS on Linux still sucks badly (security problems).
//. SMB may have its problems, but its better on security than NFS. Trusting clients for security is a bad idea.
s/on Linux
The Linux kernel, standing alone, does not constitute an OS. It's near-useless on its own. And historically, the term "OS" was never used in this way (except perhaps those that claimed that Windows 3.1 was not an OS because it runs on top of DOS).
At minimum, the basic set of services, like the C library and those daemons that the system can't really live without (pretty much all required features that would appear in the LSB document) have to be considered part of the OS. Thus most of, say, the Debian base packages or the Red Hat required packages has to be included in what you call "OS". And generally speaking, these are not exactly the same for different distributions.
Where in that article (which I read a couple of hours before it was posted on
I'm going to rant a bit here - Could the posters please make sure that the comments they post (either their own or those the submitter putin) are at least vaguely accurate and not likely to cause a goddamn flame war? This comment was completely gratuitous.
Back on topic: I actually found the article to be reasonably fair (if a bit clueless in places - the "RedHat only" poll comes to mind), but it covered some pretty deep material for CNN; stuff about Winblows NT's multi-threaded TCP stack, the stuff about Samba, etc.
Can we do without the endless flames of CNN now? Please?
What if you die while you are rebuilding your kernel?
I'd be interested to know how you stop W2k automatically restarting it immediately.
I really like the articles way of putting down Netware's strengths. Things like: About Win2k's MMC: "The console is easy to use and lets you configure many local server elements, including users, disks, and system settings such as time and date." About ConsoleOne: "We think ConsoleOne's interface is a bit unsophisticated, but it works well enough for those who must have a Windows- based manager." I'm a little confused. Must be easy to use, but not too easy? I dunno if anyone has played with the Win2k MMC, but easy to use in not something I would associate with it. It seems that to get anything done, you have to have two or three MMC's open at the same time. Other personal favorites include the System monitor in Win2k vs Novell's monitor. With Win2k, you don't need any training to get useful data. Just run this monitor, and let uncle Bill do the rest. About the Novell monitor: "If you know what to look for, it can be a powerful tool for diagnosing bottlenecks in the system. Learning the meaning of each of the monitor parameters is a bit of a challenge, though." Anyway, it is apparent who pays the writers
--WooooHoooo--
This jumped out at me because it so obviously points to a (if not the) significant benefit of Open Source (or, of at least having the source code, open or otherwise): not guessing and inferring about a black box. Microsoft 2000 "appeared" to be the only system "honoring" the performance-hitting flag of the benchmark suite. That was the argument MS gave for why Win2K's write performance was 10% of read. But the testers could infer Netware honored the flag by running the suite without it and noticing the performance increase. Nice to know. Great to be able to change inputs, observe outputs and infer process.
But with RedHat (Samba, specifically) no guessing was needed. Just look at the code! There it is. No mystery.
This suggests to me that the real SPAM threat has nothing to do with email. It has to do with closed-source systems: mystery meat. Usually nasty things are contained in mystery meat (no offense to Hormel...I'm sure Spam is fine and I remember my bachelor-days of fried Spam with Mustard on Toast fondly).
Fight spam: insist on the source! Can you imagine eating something that didn't come with an ingredient list? Why use an OS that isn't OS?
Sorry... got carried away, but the point is clear: those who care about their systems will demand access to the source.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Nothing about how you also get the freaking source code??
Speak truth to power.
Which 3 year old products does Microsoft support with patches of any sort at all, leaving out y2k fixes?
Like, say, Windows 3.x or NT 3.5.1? Yes. Are those two old enough for you?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
ouch.
hopefully this will again inspire the talented linux programmers to get out there and address these (very valid in my opinion) issues to get Linux on top.
Linux is not the best, but it can be, and many of us think it will be very soon. Right now, it's a cheap option, a very good one, but still riding in 3rd place.
BTW: I think it's reasonable that they chose Redhat as their comparison distro, since it's one of the more popular (very likely to be the choice of anyone trying linux for the first time), and has a few bundled items that weighed in favor of it over other distros.
I'd like to see Samba better integrated with FreeBSD. I also think that the Samba team should consider Apache-like licensing, as this would get some more of the big players interested in assisting the Samba development effort as they have Apache.
--Brett Glass
I'm surprised no mention was made of the limited time for evaluation of the products in these experiments.
It is obvious to me many of the things the IDG.com reviewers were considering as highlights of the MS operating system would get really annoying after a long time, but allow people to get started quickly. (Here I refer to the "Moving into Management" section of the article). Although for something like a personal operating system, this may make a lot of sense, for a network operating system, however, I would expect them to realize the point and click interface in the MS OS is going to become a pain in the rear after a few months, and they will be wishing fondly for the text based tools they mention once (and don't comment on further) in Red Hat.
Again, in the "Handling the Staples: File and Print" section, they fall into a similar trap. How many times will the average network admin want to start the "print administration wizard" and start clicking things before they start wishing for a faster, more precise technique? Below, the reviewers call the ASCII file configuration "a serious drawback" to Linux, and I agree it is a drawback - at the beginning when one is learning - but an advantage later.
The most obvious quality of a network OS from a users point of view is stability ("is my email available to me, or not?"), and this is not mentioned in the review. The experiments needed to address this question correctly likely excede the time scale this review covers. (Perhaps one can simulate a month's activity by applying a large load on the network for a short span of time, but this seems very speculative at best.) The results of such an experiment seem necessary to me to conclude which is the "King of the network operating systems".
(Well, since one of these American beers (Coors?) is the King of Beers perhaps the title is somewhat in jest?)
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
Actually, in performance it blew away Win2K and SCO. My only gripe is that they used LinuxConf to compare admin tools. In my opinion, LinuxConf is pretty crappy. I work for a dedicated server hosting company (that happens to advertise on Slashdot), and we default install Webmin on all the linux boxes for remote administration. Anyone else here ever use Webmin? It is a sweet-ass sweet program....
-- My neighbors dog has a four inch clit.
I think you're referring to Network Information Service (NIS). According to "Red Hat Linux 6 Unleashed", NIS is/was a Sun product they decided to share, hence versions for most Unices. Originally they were going to call it "Yellow Pages", but that name turned out to be trademarked (this is why a lot of files in the package start/end/contain "yp"). Haven't actually used it, but from the description it sounds remarkably similar to NT's Primary/Backup Domain Controller setups (with password management especially). I'd be interested to find out which was implemented first.
They've already managed this, I believe. I picked up my first copy of RH in April 1997, and it was already at 4.1 or 4.2. That's almost 3 years ago; give them a couple years to get to 4.1 from 1.0 and there's your 5 years.
And counting.
A better question has to do with whether they will ever attain profitability.
It also bears mentioning that RH still supports 4.2 with patches. Which 3 year old products does Microsoft support with patches of any sort at all, leaving out y2k fixes? Don't corporations care about things like this? I know my company does. We don't want to pay for upgrades just because a supplier is unwilling to properly support older products. The standard "That's fixed in the next version" pap is unacceptable. The bug is in the version I have and forcing me to pay to get defective merchandise fixed is ridiculous.
The software industry eventually will have to face this issue.
What's the deal with that?
RedHat does poorly, it gets marked down.
W2K does poorly, they call MS.
Yea, nothing like an unbiased test.
Someone please explain this too me.
It seems that the tests results completly belie the conclusions drawn
No, they didn't. Although RH had better write performance (although only slightly better with cached writes), on many of the more qualitative tests RH came out behind. These qualitative tests were based on the appropriateness of the system for serving up files and printers.
When you're looking after the file server for a hundred people, do you really want the flexibility of scripts and configuration files for the simple tasks you do every day? Have you even looked at Win2k? Using both RH and Win2k every day, I can support the authors' conclusions that the MMC tools in W2k are both fast and powerful for common day to day tasks.
Those who suggest that W2k doesn't have good scripting capabilities are also on the wrong track, IMHO. Windows Scripting Host provides access to much of the administrative interface, and Perl for Win32 can be used to automate pretty much everything (since it can access the COM objects that run the show). You'll also find almost all the GUI tools also have an associated text tool (e.g. try typing 'routemon' into a W2k machine sometime to see how to configure routing and tunnelling from the command line). If you want powerful shell scripting, grab the Cygwin tools which include bash, make, gcc, etc.
The article is also right that W2k's documentation is fantastic. Commonly used tasks get dozens of examples and step by step instructions (e.g. look up 'routing and remote access' in the help) and more arcane commands and options still contain a thorough explanation (e.g. look up 'routemon' in the help).
Before people here start making judgement on Win2k, please use it. And that means try it on a machine you actually use, for a few months--give it the same air time that you'd ask somebody trying out Linux for the first time to give.
Having said all that, I should balance this by mentioning what a great OS Linux is too (really--I like both Linux and W2k!). For serving up web pages it's got the wonderful Apache (which on Win32 is still immature), and the benefits of Open Source can not be understated. The mass of information in the HOWTOs makes complex tasks tractable, whereas with W2k if you go past the scope of the documentation you are often SOL.
First off, Red Hat came in second in the benchmarks for read/write speed, networking speeds. Yes, we don't have all the glitz and glamour, but we make up for it in dependability and flexability. The way I read the article, Windows 2000 came in last. Like the company, it is basically all looks. It was rated lowest in the read/write speed. Only reason it took the tops in networking speeds is because they had technology that the rest of us are working on. Well that is just my 2 cents worth.
David -a lowly troll-
Is this the launch of a new line of books,
:-).
"Benchmarks from Dummies"
Actually reading the article I would say they gave things a far shake, and did highlight where there testing may have not been acurate. Conclusions are always subjective based each of our requirements. They are trying to fit theirs to the bais of an IT manager.
I find it interesting that in almost every test run between a Micro$oft product and Linux, that there's almost always a black mark for the perceived lack of Windows-like tools to manange the network. If only they'd have taken more than a cursory glance at RedHat, they would have found at least one of the X tools (including linuxconf) that can manage a both a server and a network. They of course seemed to liked the fact that UnixWare has a Windows client to manage the network remotely, as if this were the only real way to manage a network. A preposterous notion, but not surprising at all, coming from Windows-centric testers. Bias lives!
benchmarks are lies ps. redhat sucks cock anyways
"....a new Encrypting File System that lets you designate volumes on which files are automatically stored using encryption."
Hmm. So Microsoft can export this? If the export laws are such a non-issue nowadays, maybe it's time to integrate the International Kernel Patch into the kernel source tree?
-- Loki@work.
> IMO both nfs and coda are superior
How did you arrive at that conclusion?
I'm aware of the fact that there are problems with NFS - but the SMB protocol (as used by samba) can't even handle something simple like file permissions.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Remember that the tests were carried out by Network World Fusion...i ng.html
;yeah, explicit - the default seems not to be 0
The following URL contains tuning details:
http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2000/0124revtun
I'm not a tuning expert, but it looks like they made some changes which wouldn't improve performance.
(I support NetworkWorldFusion fully in carrying out the tests and making the tuning details obvious.)
1. If they were using RedHat 6.1 why did they have to apply RAID patches, especially raid-2.2.14-A2 when RH ships with 2.2.12.
2. Why increase EXT2_MAX_GROUP_LOADED and fiddle with the update parameters.
3. Samba configuration - turning off "read raw" - the smb.conf man pages says this provides a major performance benefit.
(They also forgot about swat/linuxconf as samba gui's)
Its a shame they didn't carry out the performance modifications that came out of the Mindcraft 1 "study".
One in my archives is:
-----from a message Jeremy Allison posted----
b). What will give the most performance benefit is to tell Linux to use most of main memory for file cache and to keep it in memory for a long time. To do this add the line :
echo "80 500 64 64 80 6000 6000 1884 2" >/proc/sys/vm/bdflush
to your rc.local. This tells Linux to use 80% of memory for file system cache and to keep it around for as long as possible.
smb.conf tweaks from Juan Carlos Castro y Castro
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_SNDBUF=8192 SO_RCVBUF=8192
read prediction = yes
debug level = 0
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
I don't use Linux but if that's all there is I'm not impressed. CPU load graphs and so on are basic tools for a desktop OS. W2k (and others I assume) have sophisticated graphing, logging and analyzing facilities that can examine thousands of different data streams both within the OS and on running apps in the same place. We are talking a lot more than Task Manager like tools, which are like stethascopes compared to CAT scans.
Okay, I'd forgotten about beta users. I'd be interested to know your background and opinion of Win2k vs. any other NOS's you might have tech experience with. In my book hearing from a real world user/administrator counts more than tech reports any day.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
The cost to a company of buying a high end PC for a server is almost certainly less than the fully loaded cost to them of getting you to configure the OS and apps on it (and perhaps admin it for a little bit if you don't get paid much :). Once again, the ability to run on a p120 is irrelevant to the modern enterprise space.
Your dismissal of it seems to be based on ignorance. Nobody has to sit and watch it all day -- for every aspect of your computer (local or remote) that perfmon monitors, you can define different actions depending on their values. Send yourself an email, write it into the event log, run a program, stop a service, whatever. I haven't seen your scripts, but based on similar ones that I've seen, I'd wager that perfmon is a lot more efficient, more powerful, and less time-consuming.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
If my company needed a new server even for my workgroup and performance was in any way an issue they would just get another 4 way xeon with 512mb and disk array at *minimum*. Add up all those seconds of time people wait for files from it, etc, and they probably ought to spend more than that. They don't care and they are probably right. Besides the fact these kind of machines are more reliable and fault tolerant than your Acer P120 with its hard drive rattle.
For the most part I agree, but I came away from the article puzzled as to why the overall ratings for file server and network performance were so high for Win2K when so much of the article text tried to explain why it wasn't as good as the others.
What disturbed me more were the security topics. Corporate security configured through DCE cell management is cross platform and quite easy to manage once it's set up. It also has the advantage over Microsoft in supporting a full enterprise suite of OS', not just Microsoft. I know that's not part of the base for Linux, but I really don't think the file/print servers are where you want to maintain your corporate security. It's much safer to have it run be dedicated special-purpose DCE/Kerberos nodes, for the same reasons you don't run applications on the corporate firewall box.
Personally I find Netware to be the best for basic services, with a supporting *nix box for business apps. It's also a pretty common combination for a lot of companies.
Sidetrack: I'm surprised the threaded TCP stacks haven't been finished for Linux yet. Weren't they supposed to be out late 1999?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I hope they didn't run the tests with X Windows running. If its a server, don't run it unless you need to.
They say the only way to configure Samba is through the "cryptic" configuration file.
Boy, don't these guys actually *read* the documentation? Swat is included in Samba in all of the distributions (I don't use Red Hat, but I imagine it has it too).
Swat rules, I use it all of the time. It is one the very few configuration tools that doesn't fsck up when you play with the file directly.
I'll file this one under "misinformed."
I don't run Red Hat, so I chose "Other"
/.ers to do the same.
=]
I expect more than a few
"Red Hat Linux offers no graphical RAID configuration tools, but its command line tools made RAID configuration easy."
What is this? It stated that Microsoft was the author of the testing tool they used. I am not familiar with the tool itself, but I have doubts as to whether it is unbiased. It is thus obvious that they were using Windows PC's to run the testing. I myself work with Redhat in the research lab I have a job at, and to me it seems that one would not use Redhat to manage a huge network. I think it is ideal to run a network of about 20-50 users, no more. If you do happen to run a major network, you would use a SunOS or FreeBSD, if you wanted a Unix network. I am personally quite suspicious of this networking test. Who is providing funds for this test, and did they run a similar test utilizing a unix testing tool? I don't know....
Duh!!t ml
http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2000/0124revs.h
If my experiences of NT4 are anything to go by these "Enterprises" would be eating dirt after 4 weeks, at which point "pages served per minute" becomes... er, NIL.
It simply amamzes me that all these people can claim to have read the article and not know the NOS were indeed ranked. Then they go on to criticize the poster that he was indeed wrong. Whatever happened to double checking before you disagree?
Is it a popular but poor OS?
I don't know, is Windows? the number of people using something is no Indication of its quality. Remember 40% of people believe in creationism, does this make it 'better' the Evolution? I don't think so.
Red Hat's 'branding' campaign has made it sonomous with Linux, and because of that they are able to push there crappy standard as de-facto
If you look at the "score card and net results" link off to the side, Red Hat scored 6.35 while UnixWare scored 6.10 overall. In the important benchmarks, Red Hat scored 6.7 to UnixWare's 3.3 in File Services, 7.4 to UnixWare's 7.5 in Network Benchmark, and 7 to Unixware's 5 in Security.
Granted Red Hat was mentioned last in the "wrapping up" section, but in the actual table of rankings it's third not last.
In any reputable environment, you will most probably find all three NOS's used for their respective strengths. I'm getting sick of all this articles comparing apples, pears and oranges. This article came close to pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of the various OS's, but still tried to compare them against eachother. In almost any mid- to large-sized organisation, I would say it is almost a given (or at least for a large percentage) that your e-mail is sitting on a MS-Exchange server somewhere, you've got Win95/98/2000/workstation on the desktops for applications, you have Novell Netware for any heavy duty file-serving, and a UN*X box (or boxes) for your big databases. Yeah sure, SQL server on NT might show its ugly face, but I'd like to see a 40Gb+ database with uptimes of over 3 months on NT! As far as pure fileserving goes (which the article in question seems to concentrate on) None of the competitors beat Novell. Un*x started out, and still is, a multi-user system. Where people log in to do stuff. Sure, NFS has been around for a while, and Samba throws it into your Win9x workgroups, but that's not what it was made for. Win9x/2000/NT is just a desktop on steroids. But Novell was made, and always has been, primarily for fileserving. There is now way you could administor a 100+ user system *properly* using a Un*x or Windows derivative. Well. That rant was a bit longer than I expected :)
One reason why Novell did so well is that general-purpose operating systems use preemptive multitasking, while Netware uses cooperative multitasking. The latter is several times more efficient, because processes are not interrupted at "inconvenient" times and context switches can be made inexpensive. But cooperative multitasking requires very careful tuning and debugging. Novell has taken the time to do this.
Linux's degradation under very heavy loads was reported by The Gartner Group more than a year ago in a carefully documented study.
I'm surprised and disappointed that IDG did not test FreeBSD, which was recommended by The Gartner Group after its evaluation. Gartner recommended it specifically because it handled high loads better than Linux.
I wonder if this bespeaks an anti-BSD bias on the part of IDG. The company does, after all, publish LinuxWorld and run LinuxWorld Expo. I certainly hope that they did not cut BSD out of the running for this reason.
--Brett Glass
The moronic masses insist on saying that the millennium started 1/1/00, and I'm sorry to say /. posters have by and large agreed with the drivel. So, for the purposes of my post, 2100 AD signifies the next century.
.sig: Now legally binding!
These guys seem like they don't have much experience with system management.
Bells and whistles rarely get the job done. In fact, this article makes it out that LinuxConf is the only administrative option? Any experienced UNIX professional has stacks and stacks of options above and beyond LinuxConf, most I know would only use this type of software to manage their enterprise in a pinch or as a last resort?
If your enterprise is a home office, maybe these guys have a leg to stand on, but can Windows compete with any of the remote management options of any of the other OSes compared?
I also like how they draw a distinction between an OS, operating system, and NOS, or network opeating system. Can you say PC-background? To me there is no difference, the difference is MicroSoft marketing, trying to convince people that networking is an add-on feature? Don't believe the hype!
Moreover, they seem to draw the summary as a foregone conclusion, not even based on their own results but based on thier impression of others impressions of these systems? It appeared to me like Linux came in second or third in almost every comparison, where did SCO come from?
John
PS. They claim to talk about 'Enterprise,' but they don't even mention Mainframe?
Is there a list of ingredients for Hormel's Spam? I think I looked once many years ago, but didn't find it. Could someone please enlighten me? (BTW, I also once looked at the ingredients to Scrapple. Blech)
Companies like IBM see Linux as their salvation from being strangled by proprietary companies (Microsoft, Sun, etc).
Erm, IBM practically invented the concept of proprietary systems. It's only had to turn to various `saviours' in the PC market (OS/2, now Linux on the software side, along with various x86 clones on the hardware side) because it failed to take it seriously from the start, and licensed (on a non-exlusive basis) the critical components of the system architecture from outside companies (Intel and Microsoft).
If IBM had even a remote chance of owning the PC architecture (in whole or in part), it would do everything in its power to make it proprietary.
Gosh, that's easy! So intutitive too. Who needs graphical tools, let's just flip bits
BUT THE LINK IN THE SUMMARY WORKED!!!! WOOHOO!!
Lameasses
Same for ntop. If you're remotely logging into a site behind an overloaded circuit and a few bytes of telnet are the max you can squeeze through it, you still can figure out which connection is hogging the link.
In years of systems and network monitoring, I've yet to encounter a more effective user interface.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
You have NEVER worked in a real enterprise computing environment. Pitifully squealing that the performance of ENTERPRISE servers on a P60 is somehow meaningful outside of Wonderland will not stop me peeing myself laughing at you.
I assume if there's an SP1 already (before the official release date), that just means that W2K went to the presses with a shitload of known bugs.
They just didn't dare hold up the release one more time. I guess that's consistent with what everybody's saying about the expected reliability of the initial release.
What I think that you are missing that though Netware may beat Windows here, and RedHat may be Windows here, overall Windows had best scores with everything added up.
Windows had the ease of management which is what all admins really want. When I need to add a user I just want something simple and get back do reading slashdot.
Justen Stepka
Seems to me that we're seeing one of the true benefits of the competition brought about by having multiple NOS's in the field. Features from one (example: Win2K's multithreaded TCPIP stack) that seem to be a good idea are being incorporated into the others at the time of the article's writing. Such activity only raises the bar for ALL available offerings and truly seems to push the decision of which NOS to use away from the jihad of Linux vs. Micro$ft vs. Novell that it's become in recent years. The way things are boling down nowadays point to being able to select your NOS on the basis of budget and function instead. IMHO this counts as a good thing. NT/W2K's strength is that it's a kitchen sink approach to an NOS and can function in any role you throw at it. Linux benefits from it's lower cost and customisability (real word?) in that you can ditch pretty much anything you don't need that comes included in order to optimize it for the functions it will be performing. Novell I've had much less experience with and as a result will avoid making general statements about.
You mention that you would rather telnet than GUI from home because you use dialup. Ponder for a second whether you will still be using dialup in 2-3 years and then ask yourself why you won't be using remote GUI then.
Why do these reviews never include an "interoperability" or a "plays nicely with others" score?
they always seem to test with all win98 clients or
all NT clients. Ok, I don't know maybe most places are all Microsoft nowadays but in my environment we have mac, unix and NT clients and that's not going to change anytime soon. We have applications that we need access to on all platform's.
Then all these issues like microsoft's "enhancement" of DNS in Windows 2000, their deliberate breaking of samba authentication in NT SP3 and all sorts of other cases where MS toys "do not play nicely with others" would get mentioned.
And MS would get dead last in this category every time.
These are factors real sys and network admins need to know about.
I didn't like Nt4 at all, never did, never will. But after using it for 8 months I find W2k vastly better. That's just my opinion.
I do not think that the testers were biased. I just think that they were bad testers. They didn't understand Linux and thus rated it lower. They seemed to ignore Linux's typical strengths and gave too much credit for "prettiness". This isn't a MS FUD campaign, though. It is just a bunch of unknowledgeable testers.
-- soldack
I would imagine a comparison of Linux distros would probably meet with their approval. Or maybe not?
Sometimes I wonder how they decide how to improve Linux considering how it is streets ahead of everything else.
Ummmm... folks, as far as I know, Win2k hasn't been released yet, so those votes are bogus, yes?? So other than SCO, Windows NOS's are in last place in the poll.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
You don't buy or judge an NOS based upon a single benchmark result. Read the whole story and you'll see why RH Linux didn't quite make it to the top, mainly because of its poor user management abilities, monitoring tools, and lack of other niceties expected from an enterprise NOS these days.
Since only the first two categories, File Services Benchmark and Network Benchmark, were non-subjective, the results with equivalent weighting (60%-40%):
Windows 2000 6.72
Netware 5.1 9.42
RedHat Linux 6.1 6.98
SCO 4.98
Changes the picture a bit, doesn't it. These numbers accounted for only 25% of the total score with the remaining 75% in subjective analysis by Network World. This doesn't necessarily invalidate the final results, but it helps to know that the final results are mostly based on Network World's opinion.
Ethereal. Easy to use, graphical. Why RH doesn't include it is anybody's guess -- but it's easy to install it yourself, I just did it from CVS in ten minutes.
The whole thing was brought over wholesale from NetBSD.
NOT. Please don't spread this nonsense.
There once was a port of the NetBSD stack from Linux (I should know -- I did it), but it was a gross hack, and none of it ever ended up in any official kernel.
nary a word about uptime
$var = <STDIN>
$var =~ s/\\$//;
this is slashchomp
After reading this review, I am going to get Win 2K or Novell for my office. That way all my workers will be connected and we can get on the internet and have email and I can upload files from home.
Oh wait, you say. If I want email, I'll need Exchange or Groupwise for another $1000? And Win 2K doesn't have an ftp server. What exactly do I get for my $1000 then? And if my business does well and we hire another 20 people, I'll have to buy more licenses to connect to the server. How much is that? Another $500-700 for them?
Linux or BSD looks better all the time.
The article also concerned NetWare and SCO, did you notice?
To Quote :
What about xload? I know it's just basic, but there you go.
Oh, while I'm at it they say at one point that Samba can be configured only with a ASCII file and then later go onto say you can use LinuxConf. How confusing
Later.
Mark.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
To: john_bass@ncsu.edu,james_robinson@ncsu.edu
Your article contains two grave factual errors regarding Redhat Linux. I trust that these corrections can be verified and submitted to the various parties affected, so that as few people as possible need be the victim of misinformation.
"Red Hat offers the standard Linux command-line tools for monitoring the server, such as iostat and vmstat. It has no graphical monitoring tools."
Wrong. A quick trip through the default XWindows setup on any of the recent Redhat versions will reveal a panopaly of various graphical performance monitoring tools, on a par with, and in many cases superior to, the comparable Windows offerings (the most notable example of these is gtop). So, to restate, Windows has several built in tools and few other alternatives, while Linux offers a multitude of competing monitoring programs to choose from.
"Linux has a set of command-line file system configuration tools for mounting and unmounting partitions. Samba ships with the product and provides some integration for Windows clients. You can configure Samba only through a cryptic configuration ASCII file - a serious drawback."
Wrong. See the Samba Web Administration Tool. It is totally functional and has been included in Samba for well over a year.
Also...
"Red Hat Linux offers no graphical RAID configuration tools, but its command line tools made RAID configuration easy."
True, it offers no _software_ RAID graphical configuration tools. A common misconception is that hardware raid vendors do not support Linux, or support it minimally. ICP-Vortex, which makes superb mid-range SCSI RAID controllers, has had full (text-menu-based) GUI support for Linux for some time.
"Red Hat offers a basic Kerberos authentication mechanism. With Red Hat Linux, as with most Unix operating systems, the network services can be individually controlled to increase security. Red Hat offers Pluggable Authentication Modules as a way of allowing you to set authentication policies across programs running on the server. Passwords are protected with a shadow file. Red Hat also bundles firewall and VPN services."
I can't find much fault what you say regarding security on its face, and I can understand not wanting to make difficult to qualify statements about the security of one operating system over another. This only makes it ironic that you do not mention that the entire Windows family is a security nightmare, the evidence of which has been exposed repeatedly, and I mean time and time again, under the light of technical and lay journalists alike.
Similarly, your comments about "Stability and fault tolerance" bear an equal lack of judgement for an article titled "King of the network operating systems." That Windows NT has significant stability problems (which make its spate of reliability "features" entirely amusing, in a cart-before-the-horse kind of way) is beyond doubt.
But nitpicking aside, best of luck to you both.
Regards,
David
We're on the road to Tycho.
So? Is Caldera shipping with a multi-threaded IP stack?
The performance numbers for red hat for the most part don't seem like something that very with distro. There are weaknesses in the Linux kernel that limit its performance in more difficult environments (scalability of # of simultaneous users, multi-processor support); these are fairly well-known and are being addressed. However, this sort of response to criticism is detrimental. Eventually you have to realize that Linux isn't perfect. And that's the point -- we can make it perfect, rather than wait for someone else to do so.
The folks at slashdot are demonstrating their propensity for being sensationalistic, unprofessional, and barely reading articles before posting them. I rarely come here now, because in actuality, there are an awful lot of sites that distribute the same news.
I called the number and the guy has no idea what slashdot is. You got the wrong number.
Nascantur in Admiratione. (Let them be born in Wonder)
I do beleive I said console, this may come as a surprise to a windows man such as yourself, but the command line box that comes up is a "console window".
ANd how fast do you type? I can type "mkdir New" or "md New" a hell of alot faster than it takes for that box to come up.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
I'm a little late in the game here so I guess I can say whatever I want and not get my karma smashed... that's just the way it works here at /.
Don't you dumb-asses realize if you switched around what they said about Win2k and Redhat you just couldn't stop whine about an entirely different set of bullshit. All you can see is the fact that the extension of you're penis (aka linux) isn't hailed as the new god.
Personally I don't think Redhat is a very good server *nix. I run FreeBSD at home and am much happier. But anyways... didn't anyone notice that they didn't mention what version of Win2k they we're reviewing!?!? The only version that's even RTM'd is Win2k professional; if they have the not-out-of-beta more-hard-core versions it's not really fair to even review them comparatively.
Then again I would guesstamet that 80% of linux software is still in beta, so what does that say?
I'm not going to get into what OS I think is better, being a REAL geek I realize that every OS has it's strong points and weak points. Personally I think redhat is a unix trying to be windows, I mean it's sotra thought of as a desktop OS, which it IS NOT. It's a Server OS trying to be a desktop OS, which means two crappy windows clones (KDE, and Gnome) and a bunch of flashy garbage (aka enlightenment) to make you forget that you can't copy and paste between netscape and pine. (arg..)
All you guys care about is nit picking, "it doesn't seem to me redhat came in last", "oh look, they don't know what there doing", "windows sucks #include ". PLEASE!!! And what the fuck are you stupid moderators doing, marking that stupid shit up?! it's not informative, it's not insightful, it's just plain childish.
Anyway, I shut wanted to tell you linux freaks the shut the fuck up and get off the pot.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Actually I don't have to dial in now. Luckily I have a 1.1M sdsl line at home. It's great for vnc to the few nt servers we have but I still would prefere the option of using a command line over a gui. There is no way in hell that a GUI is faster than ascii. I work faster with a keyboard and vi than i can with a mouse and various text entry feilds that don't even have the tab order correct.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
One of their comments was: A suite of graphical monitoring tools would be a great addition to Red Hat's Linux distribution.
I have to say, this is a very good point. While totally disagreeing with their evaluation ranking (guess they only give you points if you place ads in their magazines), this is something that Linux is weak on.
I'm starting to think the other thing is multi-language documentation. I might try my hand at some of the French documentation, and maybe get back into Spanish or German if there's a real need. But there's a lot of things that aren't real easy to find out for the non-technogeeks.
Will in Seattle
I love it when the "best NOS" hasn't been proven in anything but a few limited rollouts and possibly some large MS shops. I will admit it has the prettiest face but based on our testing it's all make-up.
One thing the author got right - use the best OS for the app.
One of the key items that was not pointed out was the way W2k totally rewrites the standards on DNS and virtually forces you to use a MS DNS server. It's wonderful they are losing emphasis on Netbios but they are instead trashing an accepted standard.
For our installed Network base, I will continue to use Netware for file and print. I have a distributed staff that knows Netware well and can support our extensive directory. No way I want to replace this staff with Unix experts at twice the cost. I wouldn't even consider AD until it has 18 months of real world market.
We run Linux (yes - Red Hat) for TCP/IP management, DNS, DHCP, Apache, and Mail. Rock solid and for almost no cost - Mostly old hardware and no licensing.
We keep NT4 around for applications because virtually all of the off-the-shelf software for our industry runs on NT. When Linux gets into the apps market a little further (These are mostly NOT enterprise apps) we will look for Linux products.
Oracle DB servers we run are on HP. We use the same limited staff to manage Linux we use to manage HP-UX.
Some real world numbers for the most important measurement for us - stability
Unscheduled Downtime/Total Downtime
HP 99.98/99.96
Linux 99.96/99.95
Netware 4.11 99.92/99.89
NT4 98.13/97.60
I don't need any more facts to make me skeptical of Win2k until it proves it has Unix/Netware levels of reliability. Not too mention I would need 4 times as many servers, licenses, and staff just to keep it working.
So, to any one using Piranha, what do you think? How does it scale and how easy to admin? I'd rather not go out and buy one of those off the shell purple boxes, but if it takes ton of pain to go the opensource linux route, I'd rather save time. Oppinions?
I don't think so... I've been writing device drivers for years. You used to have to pay for the relevant development kit, but you can just download that for free now. Or were you referring to the fact that you have to pay for the compiler?
I use Microsoft SMS on some servers, and VNC on others. I can fully remote any server I am responsible for from anywhere I can find a phone jack. While Windows does not have this capability built in (and it should), it is still doable, and with VNC its even doable for free.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Ok, Somebody needs to beat many Linux users with the clue stick. I've seen posts whining about how Win2k got rated higher because of graphical utilities that the reviewer says Linux does not have, when in reality, Linux does have them, and they are at least comporable, if not better, to the Win2k utils. Perhaps the review reached this conclusion because he could not find them! Did it ever occur to you that perhaps some of these tools could be just a tad easier to find. Yes, they may be on the Gnome menu. Yes, they may be on the KDE menu. But are they in a central location like the control panel in Windows? Yes, there is Linuxconf, but as a poster pointed out recently, Linuxconf has a long way to go, and doesn't include basic utilities such as top or a network monitor. I'm not saying that it should either, though. Linuxconf is for configuration, not statistics. But perhaps there should be a better control panel than the one included with RedHat, because while RedHat's control panel puts many basic utilities in one location, its interface is still worse than the long forgotten days of Win 3.1
something clever
Let's see, the RedHat car is:
More reliable (1 point)
Faster (1 point)
Cheaper (1 point)
The MicroMobile car has:
A better radio (1 point)
White lettering on the tires (1 point)
A bigger speedometer (1 point)
Corinthian leather shift knob (1 point)
Therefore, we conclude that the MicroMobile is the clear winner, with a 33% higher rating than the RedMobile.
What exactly do you find so scary about it? Seriously, I would like some input. Have you read some of the articles on that site? I regularary see articles and people talking about things such as black pride, so why is it when we talk about white pride its racist? So its impossible for black people to be racist?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Yup, and telling programmers they don't need to make money for themselves, they can just be wage slaves while he gets 'paid' to do whatever he pleases, like all the rest of us wish we could do but Open/Free source doesn't really allow.
Ok, I like Linux, and I would like to see articles like this tout its speed and power. However, if this article had been well-written, I would have accepted their put-downs.
This article is not well-written as it turns out. They tout numbers, but you would think that a benchmark result would be presented in a tabular format.... Nope, that would encourage people to use quantitative comparison, and that would not show favorably on W2K. Also, they peg Linux as a sort of "almost as good as Netware" OS, but in every actual feature comparioson it comes out ahead (except for performance).
Basically, things that Linux does and none of the commercial products do are "extras". Things that W2K does and no one else does are "missing features" in the other OSes.
Someone please start doing real feature-to-feature comparisons; real benchmarks; real TCO comparisons; etc. I'm getting sick of this kind of "I think W2K is a good product because we have advertisers who want to hear us say that" crap.
As usual, the Slashdot summary of this story had no connection with reality. The story itself made no attempt to rank the operating systems whatsoever; it in fact seemed to be incredibly wishy-washy and careful in saying that every one of the systems had its good points. Red Hat was praised as the "most flexible" in the intro, and a good value in the conclusion.
t ml
Meanwhile, attached to the article are the actual rankings at:
http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2000/0124revs.h
... where SCO comes in last.
Unless you code and support an application on NT (or any other platform), it is hard to truly appreciate the stability of a system. I have worked with NT in the Web arena since NT 4/SP1, and I can tell you that I still get frustrated when you code a whiz-bang application and it goes bang on NT. If you determine it's not your code, you can spend days sifting mindlessly through application logs, Event Logs, Dr. Watson logs, Perfmon data, etc. Sometimes you can search for KB articles on support.microsoft.com and nail down your problem; or you just plop another NT, MDAC, or IE Service Pack on your system and hope the problem goes away. Then, if nothing works, you code something to monitor and restart your application when it craps out, and hope it doesn't crap out when your monitor attempts to keep your whole darn system moving. I have written programs on HP-UX that keep on tickin'; and even if they die, the OS keeps on going. Myself and my cohorts have written simple ASP pages that have choked IIS and NT, like no other poorly written shell script could. I will give NT this though: it is pretty simple to get things going in its Web environment. But this is surface beauty, as its allure just draws you in (much like the simplicity of VB), but chokes you as you try to rely on it for "Enterprise" level applications. Enterprise OS is a term that MS made up to describe their crap, while Unix and Mainframe system quietly keep the Enterprises in today's business infrastructures going.
I find it funny that the areas RedHat was marked down in were objective parts of the evaluation. Microsoft scored better than RedHat on security, stability, install and docs. They admit that they didn't test security so that should be removed from the score. Everytime I have purchased a copy of Windows NT it has come with next to no documentation. The deluxe version of RedHat comes with more documentation. They don't talk about stability in the article either. It looks like they used a large number of objective scores to tilt the results to what they wanted.
I'm sorry and will probably get flamed but...
;)
IBM released all the hardware schematics for all of the PC architectures at the same time they released the hardware. The only part of the system that was copyrighted and "propriety hardware" was the ROM BIOS and that was mostly because of the embedded BASIC interpeter. BTW - That BASIC was owned by M$ and only licensed by IBM.
Beware Developers that never heard of CPM/86
aaaand.... they say that redhat provides printed documentation - what about the online docs that ALL linux dists come with/are linked into? I mean, doesnt the SOURCE code count as documentation - you CAN NOT BEAT OSS software in documentation.
They also forget to mention that most linux boxes can maintain an uptime of a few years. I'd like to hear microsoft boast that.
The tests that are done are all fine and dandy, but when they start listing features, they shouldnt do it from the top of their heads. research it a bit and get a more broad understanding of what the features actually are and how they're available. Linux it's self is just the kernel - red hat linux is anything that comes in an rpm and then there are all of the other dists too. More than trying to prove windows is better, I think that they were just too lazy to do anything more than read what was put infront of them.
...Let's not mention that many of the Win/NT admin tools, especially the most useful ones, do *not* have resizeable windows...
Seems like CNN's reviewers preferred those cute GUI's more than anything else.
on LinuxConf:
For example, when you run a setup application that takes up a lot of the screen, the system resizes the application larger than the desktop size.
On W2K's GUI monitoring tools:
The Windows 2000 System Monitor lets you view a real-time, running graph of system operations, such as CPU and network utilization, and memory and disk usage
On W2K's Storage Management:
Windows 2000 provides the best tools for storage management. Its graphical Manage Disks tool for local disk configuration includes software RAID management;
for OpenSource.
:-( )
I note that they point out:
"But if you need an inexpensive alternative that will give you bare-bones network services with decent performance, Red Hat Linux can certainly fit the bill."
And
"However, Linux did not perform well handling large loads - those tests in which there were more than 100 users."
Given BSD has a reputation for the ability to keep functioning under a high load, it would have been nice to see BSD in thier test.
Oh well, BSD will be benchmarked at LinuxWorld. (but red hat won't be part
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
This bit makes me think ...
This looks like Samba is being started from inetd, which by default limits connections to 40 per minute. Can someone verify that RedHat's Samba RPMs install Samba under inetd by default? If so, that's the cause of the problem right there. Samba can be run either from inetd or as a standalone daemon, but if you had a box up doing nothing but serving SMB, it would be silly to run it from inetd.
--
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow
Yes. Microsoft created the OS that scored highest in this comparison.
It's funny that in the area of containing costs, utilizing an "old" computer for mundane tasks like DNS, file- and printer-serving, etc., that most people still think, "well, let's throw $X,000s at it", rather than save that money and put it where it could do better stuff.
If it was my IS shop, and the option was to spend $5000 on a nice Xeon-based do-it-all server and OS(RDBMS, W3, file- and print-server), I'd rather spend $5000 on the box and utilize it for the most important jobs (probably RDBMS), and figure out a way to reuse stuff that's already been paid for to do the more mundane tasks, and maybe even save a few $, especially if "show some savings" has been passed down from the bean counters. A good case in point is what the SysAdmins did for Cisco and their ubiquitous services (move most of them to Linux, and with SAMBA and the Linux NDS software, they fit their Linux boxes in rather seamlessly), when the "solution" from Higher Up was to throw more NT money at things...
But who am I but another AC...
Hmm... While with both a GUI or CLI the user is constrained by the configurability of the application by the developer, it seems to be the case that traditionally *MUCH* more configurability to programs is given to CLI-based apps (even if they have GUI counterparts). Add to the fact that even NT supports a bastard version of STDIN/STDOUT, then it's often more useful to script together CLI-based apps (and perhaps write a GUI tool to better view the output) than to depend on someone to make the GUI you need for you. I guess it's one of those things. Once you've used a CLI for administration it is awfully hard to like going to a non-CLI-based environment, because you spend too much time thinking about how you could have been able to solve it in a CLI fashion while cursing out the limitations of the GUI...
While some may argue that "XYZZY wasn't configured right" or "the kernel wasn't recompiled with -O3" or some other complaint, I think this is one of the few review/benchmarks that seems somewhat un-biased. This is obviously better than the recent Garter Group statements (the same guys who say "unix is dying, unix is important, unix is dead, unix is here to stay" and so on) and not centered on one vendor.
They do mention the typical "Linux problems" such as configuration and a lack of "graphical process reporting", but they (gasp) mention some of the strong points on Linux such as fast disk access, easy raid configuration, and free, scalable clustering. It is nice to see something positive for once.
But, I still have my reservations. They mention the configuration of the Redhat system through the command line and/or a graphical interface. That much doesn' bother me. What bothers me is the fact that X takes up many of the system resources in its current state. Let's face it, until 4.0 is out, the X Windowing System is not quite as "lean and mean" as other solutions claim to be. Even then, it may not be too light on the RAM. If they were running this on a server, I cannot stress that would be a cardinal sin. We run a departmental server that sits and compiles code, keeps up with web requests, runs a database, keeps our proxy going and about 5 other random tasks without falling down. We have no monitor on it, and no X. This saves us a bit of money in the hardware department. If given a choice, it would be a motherboard, 2 net cards and some diskspace. This is one of the strengths of Linux and unices in general. You couldn't survive in Windows 2000 without a monitor. I consider this a strength.
Lowmag.net
You doubtless wonder if Microsoft had anything to do with it whenever you stub your big toe.
You need multiple NICs for a router, and a lot of people use Linux for that.
Think about it this way: people who say NOS must believe that the alternative is DOS... both wrong.
I may be wrong, simply because I've never used the tools myself.. but isn't this what the YP package is for? eg, yppasswd?
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
This is what Richard Stallman is doing -- literally -- when he seeks to have people call Linux "GNU/Linux."
Linux did what Stallman could not: popularize the notion of a freely distributed open source operating system. The fact that it uses a license which is close to Stallman's is an accident of history. (Had Linus been aware of the history of the GPL and the FSF, he would likely not have chosen the GPL as the license for Linux. Alas, due to the GPL's "lock-in" effects, it's now too late. )
In any event, as you say, "GNU" isn't an operating system; it is Richard Stallman's attempt to start a political movement. The purpose of that movement, according to Stallman's own writings, was to so hurt commercial programmers that they couldn't earn a salary higher than that which a grad student makes in academia.
--Brett Glass
TCP is a pretty damn important factor in determining the value of a Network OS.
Overall Conclusions : Since w2k tools look so much better, they must be better
Ease of use is a factor. It's a lot easier to learn a GUI tool with hyperlinked help pages than a huge set of disparate command line tools. We used the w2k graphical clients for monitoring ... Like process level control
Have you even used PerfMon? I'd say you haven't since PerfMon lets you monitor specific processes. w2k does active directory!! NAH NAH NAH NAH
Active Directory is very cool, and Red Hat has no equivalent out of box.
Why can't it be a slow application?
Exactly. All of IBMs `real' computers (the mainframes) were, and for the most part still are, entirely proprietary. Have you priced support and upgrades for an S/390 lately?
The PC was viewed within IBM as a hobbyist machine that would never really be used by its primary customers (large businesses). IBM's first micro, in fact, had been proprietary. The IBM 5100 had used an IBM PALM CPU, which emulated a subset of the System/360 architecture, and ran APL. It had been an abysmal failure (1975 was too early, and the price was too high), so there was little interest in spending a great deal of R&D on another micro. The 5150 (IBM PC), then, was built cheaply, from off-the-shelf components, with neither an IBM CPU, nor IBM software (to minimise costs). It (and the PC generally) was never expected to be a significant factor in the computer market, and if IBM had known of the PC's potential, it would certainly have invested the R&D necessary to design another proprietary machine (which has always been the basis of IBM's business model).
Obviously! Any time a MS product performs better than the competition in a benchmark, it can ONLY be because MS paid somebody off. Excellent analysis!
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
It's been available to Level 2 MSDN subscribers for a while. But this is very limited availability, and I suspect the vast majority of of Beta users were already Windows based already (by the fact that they'd even subscribe to MSDN).
I also have a close involvement with the company that Microsoft has contracted to do Windows 2000 compatibility testing in .AU. The only place in the world outside Redmond to be doing so, as yet...
Hardly Linux FUD, I have Win2000 on 2 PCs at home, Linux Mandrake 6.1 and OpenBSD 2.6, I couldn't be described as a zealot for any one of these.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
> If you want powerful shell scripting, grab the
> Cygwin tools which include bash, make, gcc, etc.
That's really funny, so you fix a shortcoming of MS W2K by downloading a RedHat product off the Web and using it?
(or maybe you didn't know that Cygnus is part of RedHat software).
Btw: can perl for win32 do a decent fork() yet? Last time I checked, it did not fork at all (If so, please point me towards the url to download it, I could really use it).
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Please, sir, can you teach me how not to troll, too? Yay!
The test involved Windows 2000, the latest, greatest, most highly evolved Windows yet. Redhat 6.1 uses the 2.2.X Kernel and that Kernel is coming up for replacement in the next month or so. The new Kernel has a significant number of enhancements which would probably impact these tests significantly.
Now, let's think about where will be in 3 years. Linux is released on a schedule of more progressive evolution where new features are continuously added and released every year or so. So in 3 years, Microsoft will be touting the upcoming Windows 2003 (which will be released in 2005), and Linux will be on approximately the 2.8.X Kernel series (assuming they don't get balsy and go to a 3.X kernel).
Microsoft will release service packs of course (and probably charge for them), and these will upgrade the functionality a bit and fix bugs, but it won't touch the heart of the system which means that Linux will be WAY ahead of it very quickly. They'll run these tests and you'll see the aging Windows 2000 that doesn't feature all the new cool stuff getting its butt kicked.
Eventually Windows 2003^H5 get released and it will get close to catching up, but being a big release, it will be buggy and still leave them trailing in the dust. By the time they get to Windows 2010, they'll be totally screwed.
One other thing to keep in mind. At this time, the impact of huge investments in the Linux community are just now being felt. Now there are companies who have a vested interested in developing the boring parts of Linux like pretty GUI's and vast documentation. Companies like IBM see Linux as their salvation from being strangled by proprietary companies (Microsoft, Sun, etc).
So, I say give it 3-5 years and things are going to be VERY different.
WRONG!!! You are WRONG!!! I get so sick and tired of hearing this!!! If you understand a technology (DNS, for example), then you understand it! It doesn't matter how you make configuration changes on a server. I don't care if you edit text files or use a GUI. Understanding a technology is understanding it. Nothing to do with how you administer a server.
Maybe this is a new tactic? Seems to me like the thing w2k was best at was,"the warm fuzzy feeling" factor. Yet it turned out to be the best. It is fascinating how everything was better but at the end, Windows was best. Interesting concept. State the facts, then state the interpretation you wanted before you began. Most folks just read the conclusion any way. Even if it is completely erroneous. Hey the government has done it for decades
Am I the only one out here who doesn't use Redhat? I read everyday someone talking about Linux, and referring to it as Redhat Linux, and nothing but. For example, the poll on the article here asks what your preferred OS is, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Netware, Redhat Linux, etc. I don't really have anything against Redhat, I just don't use it. Does that mean I prefer to use some "other" operating system?
Rather true. SP1 is ready to go for the public.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
`Red Hat offers the standard Linux command-line tools for monitoring the server, such as iostat and vmstat. It has no graphical monitoring tools.
What about xload(1), xosview(1)..
The W2K disaster strikes in 3 weeks, the media is ignoring the push, and the world's richest man is going to have a cash flow problem if things keep heading the way they are now.
But suddenly some benchmarketeers rush to the rescue and "prove" to the world that shit don't stink and W2K is going to be the world's finest software product -- yes, folks, even finer than the previous prizeholder, NT4 -- and that the product that is most actively crowding NT4 out of the data center is, contrary to the perception of your senses, actually the worst choice of all.
I can't help but feel that I'm overlooking some connection beneath all this.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
SCO UnixWare came in last, not Red Hat. And file server performance isn't the top reason I'd run Red Hat, anyhow. Basically, the way I see the choices are:
If you run a pretty much homogenous network of Windows (95, NT, and/or 2000) clients, then Windows 2000 isn't a bad server, really. Where Windows 2000 starts to suck hard is if you have to support other platforms in either the desktop or the server space. But it's actually a pretty solid OS, and a "safe" pick for a Windows shop.
If speed is what matters, you run mostly Windows at the desktops, and you're not looking for an application server (because nobody in their right minds develops NLMs), NetWare is fast, efficient, and has the most robust and complete directory services out there. Not to mention that there's a tremendous amount of trained, experienced NetWare CNE's to draw upon. It's fast, it's stable, and it's not Microsoft.
But if you want to run the most stable platform of all, and you want the power of Unix's tools and services, then Red Hat is ideal. It's easy on the wallet, too. Combine Red Hat and solid hardware that has multiple power supplies and ECC RAM and you'll probably never have to reboot it. And Linux is a lot easier for a network administrator to handle than it used to be.
And if you're on crack, you'll pick UnixWare - which sucked when Novell had it and still sucked the last time I got a look at it (a year or so ago). Some of the features of Red Hat, a much higher price, and closed source. Yum.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
dual pIIIs? 650 mb ram? Not many people have this sort of hardware around do they? I know this is a server test, but one of the things about linux is that it works great on lesser hardware. I have a webserver running multiple domains, mail and web for all and it all runs quite happily on a p-262 with 128mb ram.
Yes, you will need a heavy duty system to act as a fileserver for a huge company, but I'd like to try a "real world" system using the sort of hardware that people actually do have hanging around. Ie: the p120 that provides net/ipmasq for a 100 person office, or the p200 that provides mail services to the big office.
Ya know what I mean?
This is just sad. I post a comment decrying someone's distro of Choice, and what happens? I get moderated down as "Troll". This is a sad, pathetic day for Slashdot's moderation. Red Hat Is Known to have weak security out of the box, so much so that Our University chose to put Caldera on some of the student workstations.
But I guess someone here likes Red Hat, enough to want to silence all those who don't.
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Theres a name for people like you that love something simply because other people don't - Loser Lover. You don't care if something is good or bad, you base your opinions on the will of the majority, you're just going opposite-polarity to die-hard conformists.
If Linux ever gets really popular, you'll leave it for Windows and you know it.
E.
Did they benchmark on long-run stability?
There's a Federal Bank in Britain who run Win NT networks, they shut it down once a month so that the system goes down when it's planned!
I can't believe that Win2K performs better than Red Hat, they could like even benchmark DOS 1.0 here...
Bizar technology?
My sentiments exactly. It seems with the windows/linux debate we always run into this issue of perceived simplicity versus real simplicity. I would rather have to know what I am doing and have something very simpe and manageable to work with rather than have some huge incomprehensible nest of crap that I am shielded from by an extravagant GUI. Funny, it seems that many of these "benchmarks" are really comparing linux to the benchmark *of* windows which is a set of values linux has never had in mind - probably something we'll have to deal with, though...And whoever said linuxconf was *the* system administration tool for redhat? What about the command line? ;)
So then how at the end do they come up with this next quote:
- If you want a good, general purpose NOS that can deliver enterprise-class services with all the bells and whistles imaginable, then Windows 2000 is the strongest contender.
??? The only true statement about the true king(s) of the NOS hill is what came next:IMHO, the only good thing about IDG's article is that their benchmark points the way to areas in which Linux needs to improve. By the way, look at the results of their quick poll:
Total: 8601 votes
So how is Win 2K number #1? In terms of marketing $ spent on IDG magazines, etc. perhaps?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
...tell you about the reviewers?
-- SIGFPE
Bla Blah Blah.. Lets face it folks, linux IS slow. Bunch of patches slapped toghether and they call it an OS. Its neither a good Desktops OS (windows beats it by far in this area) or a Server OS (freebsd kicks its ass in that area) I just dont understand you linux types.
Of course all organizations are flocking to intel looking for P75s to run the enterprise class ERP installations, global messaging systems, and e-commerce solutions.
Everything you said is true, but unfortunately for you, it's absolutely 100% irrelevant. Period. NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE is trying to run their business on a P75 w/16MB of RAM. But on the slight of chance that someone is, they are doing on Netware 3.12 and they are completely 100% happy with it, and not moving to Linux any time soon.
I'm certainly not trying to be anti-Linux or Pro-anything, but the points you make simply have no relevance in the Enterprise. As you go through and read most of the posts to this article it seems to me that the majority of the Linux zealots were trying to explain away the results by saying Linux would be vindicated in a "true enterprise" test, that actually measured stability and uptime. Arguing for the closet server for a 2 person business isn't going to do Linux any favors...
And I hope they opened a Command Prompt Shell in Windows NT and killed Explorer.exe. Because everybody knows that the GUI sucks unnecessary resources. I commonly kill off Explorer when running big tasks on NT and 95/98 machines. As long as there's a Command Prompt available just type 'explorer' again to get back your desktop.
You have contributed nothing to slashdot other than your jackass backwards .sig file.
There's no reason for a sig here.
Sun said they were unwilling to participate because they were working on a new version of Solaris. But in the case of Linux, they are always working on a new version. I think just for fun, they should have tried a 2.3.x devel kernel on their RedHat box to see how that held up.
...these tools are typically cryptic and require a high level of proficiency to use effectively.
And another thing, they briefly went over how the different OS's handled failures and load balancing, without giving any information as to their stability. I have never tried W2K and would have liked this information shared.
Isn't someone with a high level of proficiency more effective anyway?
Novel 5.1 had difficulty, but was able to do simple file and print sharing. However, it had difficulty doing anything else.
SCO hung on the install, seemingly unhappy with it's non-compliant hardware.
RedHat installed easily, and made a fine NAT, file server, web server, and whatever else we wanted to use it for.
Windows 2000 laughed at us. It was a humbling experience.
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
It seemed like this article was aimed at small to medium sized companies, and as the article showed, easy to use graphical managment tools are a must for any NOS today. Linux still lags behind Win2000 and Netware in terms of graphical admin tools.
As has been posted here before, I think that the Linux community needs to get together and make a standard config tool, that would allow third-party plugins, and have no usablity issues, as was pointed out about linuxconf in the article.
Because it's something we always need to remember.
:).
It's nice to know Linux is fast (and it's no shame to get beaten out by Novell; they have a lot of experience in the area).
But for 99% of the server tasks people have in this area -- the interoffice server, sharing files and providing print and mail services, you could buy a meatier machine if you needed it. The real issue is reliability and ease of management. You need the thing up, period, because the whole office stops if it's down. And you probably prefer if you didn't have to have a tech for your department just to babysit that one machine. Ideally, your central tech support for all departments (or your part time tech support guy, if you're small) should be able to keep it running with minimal effort. We are, after all, looking for core services here, not cutting edge stuff.
IDG gave Linux the props it's due: Linux will beat out NetWare when it comes to building funky custom solutions. NetWare is very good at what it does. But you have to pay for every server module you want, and they're of course not open and flexible like the Linux ones are. NetWare would make it much harder for you to have that central office machine also be the web development machine for the office -- i.e. not only serve the files, but allow you to update them. And I don't know anything at all about adding database functionality to NetWare to drive a fancier website -- all very easy in Linux, and all there as soon as you want it.
This is one of the most balanced reviews I've seen. I may not agree with their choice of winner, but I can't criticize IDG's fundmental strategy of "choose the best NOS for your capabilities and your needs".
Of course SCO is worthless; and Solaris must be considered for its impressive scalability. Linux is fine for most scalability tasks, with the exception it seems of multiple NICs (which is a weird case anyhow. Rarely does a server need more than a single 100mbit link, and a quad-Xeon Linux box will chew up heavy duty database stuff very sweetly
Why does everything have to be graphical? Can someone please explain to me the reasoning that because it has pretty icons, it is inherently better? I don't want the overhead of graphics to waste server resources damnit. If companies would wuit being cheap and hire people who KNOW something about being a real administrator and not someone who can point and click thier way around an interface, we would have inherently better admins. This is my only big gripe against microsoft. I'm not a big fan of the product line but my biggest issue is that they have forced a generation of clueless administrators who can ONLY point to a an icon and have no idea how to go beyond that.
I know some MCSE's who can script and manage the hell out of an NT server. My director is one of them but he is an exception among the masses. The windows gui is not condusive for remote management and I sure as hell wouldn't WANT to try and pipe those graphics over a dialin connection to the office just to fix some issue. Linuxconf has a great ascii based version for consoles and it happens to rock. I know that there are web based versions of several of the microsoft admin tools but there is still the overhead of loading the graphics via browser. I want to get the job d0one and get it done fast. To me that means editing a textfile real fast and restarting a service.
Moderators: please don't moderate this up because it's anti microsoft. My points could apply to any OS that forces a graphical administration and lacks in any form of truly remote management.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
slashdot takes a good 5 minutes to load something after I click on it. How about you configure an identical box with FreeBSD for a few days and see how it performs? Now that would be an interesting real world benchmark.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Hey, you went and read the actual articles, and didn't apply the kneejerk/antiLinux filter to them either.
We don't do things like that around here mister.
One of the things that seems to be stressed a lot in this article is the availability of easy to use GUI administration tools. Personally, I would vote for any Unix over Windows 2000 simply because I know that if somthing goes wrong, I can boot into single user mode and edit some configuration file with vi and away I go. You can't do that with Windows. Windows is built for the GUI, has this great monolith of a database for storing configuration settings, and has so many abstractions to remove the user from the actual internal workings that nobody actually knows the nuts and bolts of how the thing actually works. Windows makes it easy for someone with little computer experience to get somthing done. While this is a good thing in some respects, I think that it also makes people more ignorant to the technology that they are actually working with. I would much prefer to learn how the internals of networking and security work than to learn the idiosyncrasies of a GUI interface. Red Hat may not have all of the click and drool stuff, (it is meant for someone who actually knows a thing or two about networking) but it does have a rich set of tools (as does all Unix) to get things done efficiently.
I'd almost have to agree. Lightweight FUD? Certainly an awful lot of "mmc" "snap-in" "this is easy to use" stuff, when describing Win2K. They mentioned "no GUI" for Samba. I guess their web based management tool isn't enough?
After reading the article I got a really uneasy feeling as if the author did not want to get flamed for not doing the tests properly, but still *wanted* to show MS Windows 2000 as the best and Red Hat as the wrost.
It seems that the tests results completly belie the conclusions drawn... Here are some things I noticed...
File system performance
-----------------------
Test Conclusion : Windows 2000 sucks, RedHat is pretty good
Overall conclusion : Looks like no weightage was given to the overall conclusion based on these results
TCP Performance
---------------
Test Conclusion : W2k seems to be the best, RedHat sucks but will get better
Overall conclusion : AHA... Something in which w2k is the best. Now I will be vindicated in calling w2k the best NOS and Redhat the worst
Management Tools
----------------
Test Conclusions : W2k tools are really polished and provide setting many system settings. No remote management. Redhat is definitly more klunky, but lets you do pretty much whatever you want to, and from where ever you want to.
Overall Conclusions : Since w2k tools look so much better, they must be better
Monitoring tools
----------------
Test results : w2k has graphical clients to monitor CPU/Memory usage. RedHat does not
Overall conclusion : We used the w2k graphical clients for monitoring the system resource usage while our tests were being conducted. We did not even bother to look at linux tools like g-top which do exactly the same thing, and more. Like process level control. Since we did not use these tools, they do not exist. Ergo w2k is better. So there. Also although Unix utilities are a lot more flexible, and can be scripted, since they are too complex for us, they are pretty much useless for everyone else as well
Client Management
-----------------
Test Conclusion : w2k provides active directory and users and groups and oh my!!! Redhat only provides unix level control. Ha that old security model can't do users and groups and... well it can't do active directory so there!!!
Overall conclusion : w2k does active directory!! NAH NAH NAH NAH
And so on and so forth!!!!
It looks like they did put in some effort in doing the tests right. But it looks like they also put in a lot of effort into making the results fit their apparently pre-drawn conclusions
I noticed that they said linuxconf was unweildly ( my word) for them. I would suggest webmin over linuxconf in most situations anyways. With support for ssl and being accessable by web browser ( i know linuxconf is as well) it makes remote admin a charm.
That leads to my second point. I've never worked with novell but why run a gui on a server? I still can't get past this. The key to *nix in general that I find to be most appealing is true remote admin capabilities. Do it all over ssh and there's the secure connection you need. Is remote MMC encrypted? I ask because I haven't had a chance to play with it.
It just seems to me that a gui is a bottleneck in a server.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Regardless of how many features win2k has (and perhaps especially due to its number of features), the most important thing is how well they are implemented. It doesn't matter how many features RAID system has if the server blue screens once a day !
ok so i went to the site and saw that ya rh was in last place but yet when you went to the page where it was pick your favorite OS, RH was in the lead. Yes RH, no their weren't other distros of linux their was RedHat so why if someone was voting and they wanted another distro of linux why didn't they put other which would be the appropriate spot for another distro, They didn't have just Windows, they had y2k and nt, so the people who picked RedHat were voting for RH so is RedHat Being linux or is it being redhat?
Way to throw in that religious flame, it makes your comment just *THAT* much more credible..
Finally this matter has been laid to rest. I am so relieved that a thorough, unbiased company such as IDG as taken the time and effort to find out the truth. No that we all know that Windows 2000 is the best its time to dump Linux and start working on our MCSEs! A fine upstanding company such as IDG would not take all that advertising money from a company like Microsoft if their products were inferior!
then I wonder how so many people even rated windows2000, seeing that it's not even released to the public yet. There surely can't be that many beta testers who happened to come across this poll (twice as many as regular NT users)
oh well.
Oh man here I go... I was so happy to replace the 486dx2 with this monster. And I got it with an ISA/VLB/PCI Opti board. My P60 had the FDIV problem, but I didn't care, Duke3D and others ran fine. Finally I sold it for a token sum to a friend's friend.
And I didn't know there were other OS-es than DOS/Windows on the PC. Good old days...
Free Slash !
To me, the most troubling thing about the test is the subjectivity of many of the results. I can accept that from things that are essentially subjective by nature, like which tools are easiest to use. The problem is that some of the elements of the test are essentially objective features but have not been tested objectively.
A total of 40% of the overall score was in the categories of Scalability (20%), Security (10%), and Stability and Fault Tolerance (10%). Those are objective categories. You can test how well a system scales, how secure it is, and how stable and fault tolerant it is. Instead of testing, though, the reviewers "took a qualitative look at each NOS's management tools, security measures, stability and fault-tolerance features..."
Based on their comments, these judgments were made not on the basis of how well each system actually performed in the listed fields but by what features it offers or claims to offer. No mention was made of critical factors like system uptime/downtime. No test was performed to see if the offered features actually succeeded in providing the capabilities they were alleged to give. It's simply unreasonable to give overall scores to 2 decimal places when the data going in is a bunch of subjective judgment based on no substantive testing.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
A big scorer in their tests was Netwrok management tools. There Red Hat scored poorly because of its "largly command line tools". Still it is nice to see Linux get some reviewers attention. You take it with a grain of salt and try and improve any weaknesses. That is a lesson Microsoft still has not learned.
The monitoring tools they seem to be looking for are network monitoring tools. The three or four mentioned (gtop, xosview...) are NOT network load monitors. There is a net-flame epplet, and I believe gkrellm monitors networks. Please interpret correctly before responding.
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