Slashdot Mirror
Linux vs. NT Reliability
buckrogers writes "Bloor Research has finished a year long study that shows that Linux is more reliable than Windows. In the study Linux failed once for four hours because of disk drive issues while Windows failed 68 times for "hardware problems (disk), memory (26 times), file management (8 times), and a number of odd problems (33 times)" for a total of 65 hours. I like the category "odd problems." "
Finally! I read something true, pertinent, original semi-transparent regarding our favorite OS! I question blaming the OS for hardware-related failures, but interesting nonetheless.
65000 bugs in the code, 65000 bugs, sell the code, release a patch, 66000 bugs in the code. 66000 bugs in the code, 66000 bugs.....
which is kinda sad.
Sure it's a study. How do you think they calculate MTBF?
I really had no idea, thanks for showing me the light - I have been left in the dark all this time!
Seriously, why do you insist on feeding us this Linux RA RA RA BS? We get it already!
This would solve the problem onces and for all.
Just have VA and MS team up for a short while to "prove" which OS really is more stable. The Linux and MS comunities will not believe any one but there own so this is the only way to really know.
Why hasn't this been done???
Windows 95A. Remember that? I remember hearing from Windows beta testers back then how i was such a loser for sticking with Solaris (I had a SPARC box... as well as a 486 with linux) and how they're going to kick my boxen's ass with their new supery duper fast Win95.
I remember hearing about how stable it was (well, it WAS a HUGE leap from Win3.1 in terms of stability). I remember everybody saying after the win95 hype went over... "Wow, it has like a million bugs".
It may only of had 1000 real ones, but look what it did. Now look at it. It (win95) more or less went down in history as the most unstable OS ever to hit the commericial market (well besides MacOS). So in 5 years, how will we look at Windows 2000?
maybe if its just sitting there idling you'll get a years uptime. real world? NO.
look at slashdot, > 99% uptime? *cough* i don't think so. more like 85-90%
Photoshop, 3D studio MAX etc, runs fine.
I keep a win95 box for cd creator.
Here are your heart pills Sir.
Shall I dim the lights so you can simmer down?
Wingnut
Actually, the iMac is the one for clueless newbies. Windows seems to be for those who must step in line with everyone else. I can't find any other reason besides apps to select it, and what good are the apps if they cost $$$$$$?
Have you never heard of BackOrifice? All someone would need to do is to write a BO TFN plugin, and suddenly, Windows is part of the attack.
Windows just got smacked!
The problem with using brand new bleeding edge hardware is that it's brand new bleeding edge hardware. If something breaks who do you blame? If you use well know hardware that is know to work well then any problems are likely to be elsewhere.
This is totally true, different distributions of linux come with different optimizations in their kernel configurations. Eg: default USE_DMA configured in the IDE controller section. Some for NT: eg. noone bothers to install the latest BMIDE drivers from Intel. The list goes on in that context. One blatant oversight that makes this specific "test" totally irrelevent regardless of the reader's camp (NT vs linux) is that there were only two machines involved. This test is no more valid than any before it. One machine could have had bad memory. One machine could have had a loose heatsink, etc etc etc. Without multiple test systems on each side, any single hardware problem ( and there could be dozens ) could skew the results all to hell. Whoever came up with this test did not sit down and intend to release a totally objective study.
The article seems to be rather biased... they ignored performance issues completely, failed to even mention that much of this doesn't apply to the *current* version of NT, and went to a lot of trouble to explain away NT's scalability advantages.
Isn't it about time SlashDot started posting honest articles that admit to the advantages and disadvantages of both operating systems?
Why did this one gett only a one while the guy he was replying to got a two?
The guy with the 2 has that because of his karma.
The solution to this problem has been solved in countless other industries that it amazes me that no one has adopted it here.
At the bonneville saltflats, when you are trying to break a record, you first run the stretch one way, and then the other to adjust for the wind.
Now why didn't they run them for six months and then switch boxes for the other six month. Then you get complete, unbiased results. So simple it is stupid.
Joe
jlrice@crosswinds.net
There already IS a TFN plugin for BO...
Let me help you...
Year long study.
Linux crash one time, hard drive bad, down 4 hours.
Windows crash 68 times, many reasons, down 64 hours.
Linux 16.25 time more reliable than Window
I wrote it slowly cause I know that you can't read fast. I appologize because I can't draw you a picture.
Please, please, lets have more 'news for nerds' and 'stuff that matters'. Hating Microsoft is old. The arguments are old. AND YOU ARE BECOMING BORING
MS will continue to trash NT because W2K is just plain more reliable. Do I hear the pathetic cry of Troll coming from some Open Sorse religious fanatic? Yeah, too bad....
Run six months on one box then six months on the other. That would make the test fair.
Statistically, you would need a sample of around 1500 boxes for each OS that you wanted to test and all of these boxes would have to be kept in identical environments. This simply isn't practical and even 5 or 10 boxes in a study would have people crying that the sample wasn't big enough.
That being said, it is unlikely that hardware could cause a machine to crash because it ran out of memory 28 times. This is obviously an OS/application issue.
resorting to personal attacks. You are calling a fellow human being irrationally blind because he expressed his opinion, what does that make you? What are you making the whole NT advocacy look like with your rant?
:)
CHILL OUT!!!
This is a discussion about a news article about a report that claims Linux has greater reliablity than NT.
The report seems to reinforce my own experience with both Linux and NT. Linux stays up as long as the hardware doesn't fail, NT crashes several times a week if you use it as a workstation.
So I believe the report to be true. This is _my_ opinion.
Now, what do you believe?
And try to stick to the facts, not my discusting personal habits...
doesn't sound too unbiased to me.
But I have been using Win2k for a month - and I've yet to encounter a (noticable) bug. The machine has yet to crash a single time.
yes I have to agree that with your uptime of a Whole month on Win2k Microsoft has indeed set a new record for reliability. Take a look at my Linux uptimes:
11:45am up 344 days, 23:38
That's just one of about 200 Linux servers in our organization. All of them have pretty much the same uptimes. I've yet to see any Microsoft OS on any kind of HW stay up even close to that.
and it still came out this far ahead?
I know that Linux running on a CPU runs that CPU cooler to the touch than Windows or NT. This is a test that you can do at home. Run NT at its login screen for an hour and touch the heatsink near the CPU, it will be warm. Careful that you don't burn yourself. Now run Linux at its login screen for an hour and touch the same place on the heatsink. Is is cooler. Isn't science fun!?
I also seem to get an hour more out of my laptop with Linux than with NT or 98.
Maybe Windows just stresses out the hardware more and causes itself to crash because of that?
If you had to reboot NT more than 68 times, you're simply an incompetent moron.
ISN'T The MIcrosoft company going to fix their software so they can make it stable or are they going to stey the same where it's a probability of craching is about 1/50 about everytime you start up Windows. P.S., I can tell MS is too friggin' lazy to fix their softwares.
Yes they have, it is only mode windows will run in. At least it was until some multi-user functionality was kludged on top of the system!!!
Yes Linux is much more stable then NT. NT is old technology. But Win2k is much more stable and never needs a reboot (unlike linux).
it looks like everybody is confusing any UNIX like open system with LINUX in fact there are possibly more freeBSD and openBSD servers out there then LINUX servers, this for several reasons : freeBSD has a better memory management and is much more reliable then LINUX openBSD is even better performing then freeBSD and considered as more stable. Both BSD systems are originally derived from the UNIX 4.2 BSD which is already more then 10 years old and therefore has a very large support especially in the Universities Universities are still very reluctant to run OS's which are not originally University OS developed. besides this the largest sites known YAHOO, HOTMAIL etc.. are run with freeBSD because of its excellent memory management however stick to LINUX, but LINBUX develppement forces are now in the hands of commerce people, they want to capture the 90 desktop market and a lot of workforce is going into office type developpements, userfriendly desktop and installation. a COREL or MANDRAKE installation is a nightmare fore a UNIX purists, it installs everything you want and even everything you don't want or even need. it adds scripts where simple .conf files would do the job and makes it very difficult to debug any problemes. however have fun everybody but don't forget the others.
Balonie!!! I've had NT 4.0 running for 6 months without re-booting using various apps which stress the system. This propaganda has got to stop! Only early releases of 4.0 had problems...it's a VERY stable OS.
I have to surf at -1 to get all the goods. Can't seem to surf at even 0 anymore, I miss good stuff all the time.
Oh well, at least it is a choice. But if slashdot wants to prove that moderation of it's sort works, well, they need to fix it. It is SORELY broken.
Your question should have been "Isn't it about time that Slashdot started looking at things through Microsoft's eyes?" After all, we all know that anytime we want to read unbiased and honest articles about the advantages and disadvantages of both operating systems we can just look through Microsoft's site! (And hell just froze over).
>look at slashdot, > 99% uptime? *cough* i don't think so. more like 85-90%
:-)
I surf slashdot a lot around 3-4 pm and 8-9 pm. Reliability is actually about 40% for me. I usually don't expect ANYTHING work on slashdot. I can't fault them for it though, I'm sure it is just a peak period.
Only uncle fuckers like yourself assume bullshit like that. Now go play QIII, you silly bitch. I am still going to kill you.
what's even more tired is stupid bastards like you who can't write correct html. you are one dumb bastard if i've ever seen one.
You can resume being a dumb fuck now.
Need to reconfigure networking? Reboot.
Need to install a program? Reboot.
Need to change nearly anything at all? Reboot.
Need to install any number of service packs? Reboot.
Trying to serve a lot of users? Reboot daily, or NT will all by itself.
My advice- pull your head out, it smells better out here.
The just spent 10 grand on a WinNT box to run their mailing list. The network enabled version would have cost them another 30k. We're talking 10k names, and 25k transactions per year.
Lissen up, kiddo. It has an uptime of no more than 90 minutes. GPFs, hangs, you name it. It's a Sybase SQL server with a PowerBuilder front end, that's as good as it gets. The reporting module is great, except it always crashes. They ended up getting a copy of SeagateSoftware Crystal Reports for the heavy lifting.
I _have_ duplicated this overpriced piece of crap with PHP/PostgreSQL, and they are using it for InKind donations, and I'm trying to get them to use it for volunteer tracking.
The Executive Director is afraid that I've already generated too many unanswerable questions. HaHa, who said nobody ever got fired for buying Windows?
For another comparsion I have a dual boot PC on my desktop at work. This is Win98/RedHat 6.1. The keyboard and mouse are USB based. If I go home with it booted in Win98 when I return the next morning I can't use the mouse or keyboard and have to reboot! Over Christmas/NewYear I left it in linux for 2 weeks -- telnet/xwin from home. When I returned the USB drivers for the keyboard and mouse were still functioning perfectly!
I have a dual P-III with 786MB of memory that has been up in another lab since the last power outtage [106 Days]. This has 3 ethernet and one token ring connection and has been sniffing very loaded networks and doing compiles at the same time. In addition network connections have been broken and reconnected many times. I know that NT, Win98 and Win2K are not robust enough to do this!
I don't know about NT, but I dual boot linux/ win98, and my experiance is this-
I blew out a motherboard, and a couple HDD's due to power supply problems. Got a new motherboard- same processor, linux rebooted like nothing had changed. Win98- ended up having to re-install the whole damn thing, so it could find the correct 'drivers' for the motherboard, with several (4, I think) reboots to get it right.
I do not plan on killing you. I don't like you but killing is not my style. I apologize if I've offended anyone.
Yeah, when all you've got the Linux box doing is serving some static web pages, I'm sure your uptim will be forever. I've had an NT4 server doing the same thing for just about as long.
Here's an artistic analogy of Windows 2000. Some may find it a little "deep". http://www.public.iastate.edu /~gea/win2000_launch.jpg
Memory problems mean an error in the memory paging scheme or memory dumps, not hardware memory failures. The 2 systems were completely identical and hardware problems have not been counted in.
I'm glad to hear someone else has a sensible opinion. I think we all know that Linux is more stable than Windows (with maybe the exception of Microsoft themselves), however I think it ridiculous that some of the NT "Administrators" on this board feel they have to reboot their servers nightly. Yes, I have to reboot my Windows boxes more often than my Linux boxes (which are rebooted a max of once a year), but still don't get rebooted more than once every 3 months or so. I think if this study reported the opposite results most of the people on this board would be screaming about how unfair this study is. An unfair test is an unfair test no matter what the results. I wish the "nerds" on this site were able to maintain scientific rigor.
To run another such test..looks like we gotta wait another year. It'd be good to test Debian Potato vs win2k for low end. and maybe turbolinux's cluster stuff for the high(er) end. I don't doubt though that people will complain that win2k wasn't tested fair because it isn't on at least SP1 though :/ I wonder if you can install a SP in win2k without rebooting? I'd imagine it's similar to installing a new build of win2k. few weeks/months ago i upgraded a test machine from 2123(???) to 2155 and i had to reboot it. not a good sign. i've rebooted it maybe 40 times since (not for crashes though.) my mission critical servers haven't been down in 6 months(178 days) the ONLY time they are out is because of a major power outage. nate aphro@aphroland.org
...and it crashed
Linux just got luckier that it didn't fail.
That's the point. You call it "luck", I call it "reliability".
It's like trying to boot NT w/ broken SCSI controller. It just doesn't want to boot (BSOD). But if you try to boot Linux with that same controller, Linux will disable the controller (faulty channels) and continue booting.
True - the controller WILL NOT work, but I don't expect it to work. The fact that system won't fail because of faulty controller makes me sleep good.
That is called 'reliability'.
Windows are far more compleate and complex than Linux.
Nobody knows. They stopped counting about seven seconds into it when they ran out of fingers.
running notepad in 5 separate windows does not constitute "stressing the system". Nice try, Mr. Ballmer.
you also have the gui included in the kernel. how fucking stupid is that, you dumb moron.
Then type 'go' at the PROM prompt...
Win NT uses VxDs?! Come'on TummyX -- If you are going to go to wall for MS here on Slashdot, I expect better of you.
NT crashes every 4 hours when you are using an evaluation version and the time trial expires. Try using licensed software, instead of stealing it.
Even if you were to compare apples to apples, recent versions of Lotus Domino on NT is far, far more stable than Exchange.
But let's not confuse application issues with OS issues, even though MS packages them together.
LiNuX iS MoRe eLiTe THaN WiNDoWZ.
The master process of Apache is not designed to be reboot all the time. Since Apache allow external modules so it is safe bit to assume that those modules can introduce memory leakage. I think it is clever design to let child process die when there is no much traffic.
uuh..no..dummy. he said HANG. that means keyboard unresponsive.
Right. ... IIS4 prompted M$ to add the copyfile() to the NT4 kernel, and it's the SOLE reason why it kicks the ass of every other webserver hosted on NT4 for static pages. Sending the webpage is basically: inFileFD = open(read_only,"index.html"); ioStatDescriptor = copyfile(inFileFD, outSockFD); mutex_wait(!ioStatDescriptor->busy); Kludges like this expose the kernel. Now what has W2K added??
Once the BBC did a programming your PC for TV series (big success). If one of the distros did a TV series featuring their brand Linux - to educate the masses, say featuring a Dell or IBM - Money would be had by all.Sell the series cheaply
By getting Linux groups in a frenzy. Thought 2.2 good, but there were a few nasties in it. 2.4 is better still. Reliability or Features.... pick one
"They stopped counting about seven seconds into it when they ran out of fingers."
That is totally untrue! They stopped counting when the integer variable they were using overflowed and crashed their operating system.
Does MS have a flag/bsod option, so when it does crash, it reports it. W2K tries to self heal through 2nd level handling. It MAY not be as stable as it seems. People are reporting fewer BSOD's - but a covert service restart is of significance- but are you looking in the right place?
Oh please..... this is so funny.... stop it it almost hurts... Well... My friend bought a 20 Gb HD last week... due to windows *advanced* features uses, neither win95, win98 or winnt will give you more than 8 Gb out of it.... that's it... the god damn 20 Gb hdd can't give you more than 8 Gb.. (unless of course you run linux, which, due to its lack of advanced features gives you access to the whole 20 Gb hd... oh well... I'm really not trying to be offensive you know.. but that post really made me laugh :)
I agree, I can crash NT 4 anytime I like, but I've been giving a couple of 2000 boxes grief since RC2 without a single crash. Just wondering if the crash screen is still blue...
NumberOfBugs(Linux) - aLot = NumberOfBugs(Windows2000)
You've got to be kidding me. This is the usual, "I'm so great," linux poweruser bull that the new linux user community has been served for years. You have no idea how frustrating it is to be drawn to linux by folks like yourself, who tout it as being more stable than x, and the up and coming OS that everybody and their brother will be using...only to find that you're only interested in bashing Microsoft, and telling us to RTFM. After a week of not being able to do anything but ls | more at the command line, getting crap like RTFM (when, in fact, there is no definitive M), and trying to configure ridiculously obfuscated network settings, I'm ready to go back to windows. It may be slower, less stable, sold by the devil, the stuff you wipe with after a good bowel movement, or whatever...but at least it has friendly support (you people could work on this one), copious amounts of software, and configures with just a few clicks of the mouse button.
You've got to be kidding me. This is the usual, "I'm so great," linux poweruser bull that the new linux user community has been served for years. You have no idea how frustrating it is to be drawn to linux by folks like yourself, who tout it as being more stable than x, and the up and coming OS that everybody and their brother will be using...only to find that you're only interested in bashing Microsoft, and telling us to RTFM. After a week of not being able to do anything but
ls | more
at the command line, getting crap like RTFM (when, in fact, there is no definitive M), and trying to configure ridiculously obfuscated network settings, I'm ready to go back to windows. It may be slower, less stable, sold by the devil, the stuff you wipe with after a good bowel movement, or whatever...but at least it has friendly support (you people could work on this one), copious amounts of software, and configures with just a few clicks of the mouse button.
That's what linux is missing, and may never have. In windows 9x, a few clicks and a reboot is all it takes to get a workstation on the network. It's basically the same with NT, just a little more technical, for control purposes. In linux, you have to ensure the the damned OS works with most of the hardware in your box, then play with text files all day until you think you've got it. You'll never really be sure, though. And that's just for a workstation...don't even get me started on a server.
This is a critical time for linux, because it can go in one of two directions, and it's users that maintain a presence on the web are the primary determinants of that direction. Support needs to be increased for users x1000% (both in terms of quality, and availability) and usability needs to become less conveluted, or linux will die...and nobody, especially not me, will miss it.
Think about that next time you bitch and moan about Windows, or complain about newbies. Never forget that Microsoft can still beat you. You have a long way to go before the world will embrace your beloved OS with open arms, for linux is obfuscated, never works on the first (or second, or third, or fourth, etc..) try, has a terribly embittered technical support structure and simply can't stand up to the workable, easy to use, GUI of a microsoft product. I suppose that this is what happens when you let angry, asocial programmers that live in ivory towers design an interface for the user.
Who said an operating system was anything about GUIs! Linux doesn't claim to have all the support in the world, indeed the only reason that NT does is that when people design software they design it for MS platforms, not for Unices (or Linux.... whatever). You are obviously interested in computing. Why not learn a little then? Go out and read about multitasking or something, then come back and learn some SIMPLE COMMANDS to get Linux to do what you want - innovaters don't give up at the first little problem :) As for "this is a critical time for linux"... bwah bwah ha - it isn't at all, we all have acknowledged that Linux wins hands down when it comes to computing; so maybe it is underdeveloped as yet but then when NT was starting out, it had no fancy apps or bells and whistles. In short: grow up! M
For the bank that I worked for previously, IT systems would fail frequently, simply because there were so many systems in place. However it was noted that roughly one Linux server in twenty NT servers went down (i.e. failed - not just a reboot). We are talking three lines of support, 450 strong IT and user support team. This is a corporate computing environment: proper usage and testing. Why don't these figures match with anything in the report?!
Please explain to a confused (if a little bored by reports as these) person.
You sound like that dumb marketing guy who whinges about long-haired linux zealots...
First, your friends were a bunch of idiots. How could anybody with sense compare Solaris and Windows. I see people comparing NT and linux and solaris, that's OK to a point, but plain vanilla windows and anything? That's a joke.
Second, Win95 contained huge changes, and it's probably inevitable that in an industry with low standards compliance as was the case back then they should have problems. They don't do an excellent job with it, but it's OK.
Only a year. Egads, I've had Back Office servers that have been up for 3 years. It all depends on the skill and familarity of the Administrator. As for the hardware, I have a tendancy to like DEC. Now that the Alpha has been dropped from the M$ support and DEC was folded into Compaq(ed), I do not know which direction I am going to go for hardware. As for Linux, I still seem to think that the mass marketability (excuse the spelling) is severly limited do to the complexity of setup. I would hate to see the fustrations that the average Joe goes through when they attempt to find out what this "Linux thing" is all about. Finally , I need some advice and/or commentary. I recently purchased Corel Linux Deluxe edition. I have two problems that are confounding me. 1) I have an ATI128 chipset AGP All in Wonder Card. Any support in Linux for this one ? (I have since swapped the video card down the my old one, a Matrox Millenium w/ 2 MB and PCI base). 2) How come the default windows install appears to be quicker on the response time than the default Linux ? I've already checked for server side processes running and have disabled things like Apache. Any thing else I should look at ? (Please, no flames.) (Box stats : 233 AMD K6, 32 MB ram , 2 4 GB HDD each dedicated to a respective OS, Matrox Video) Sean nt_bert@hotmail.com
Hi, I installed our Linux Samba server eighteen month ago (on the same server also runs proxy, mail server, dialup server, fax server, DNS server and firewall) and during the last eighteen months the server fall down once and the reason was empty batteries in UPS after power down. On the same server I had there WinNT before, on the same server, but there was the Blue screen of death almost every week.
My friend, which is fan of Microsoft products (and administrator in one big company), tried to exchange their WinNT 4.0 server with the last Beta of Win2K. After a few days he had to throw away the Win2K because of big problems with DNS and he returned to WinNT 4.0. I think, that this two examples from the real live does not need comments. Tomas Morkus, INTAC s.r.o., tmorkus@intac.cz
Oh wow - you have been using Win2k for a month. Is that just you on your workstation? How cute. Me too. Do you have any idea as to HOW these were tested; really, not by some jerk on his home PC for a month that's for sure...
hahahaha
Yet making drivers for Linux is easier and faster than making drivers for NT.
I just installed the release version of Win2k 3 days ago and all I can say is this is a big embarassment. I have also used one of the beta releases and quite honestly the release is no more stable. A number of major software packages don't work, it's riddled and it's riddled with bugs. I don't even want to talk about the buggy installation process. IMHO, NT 4 was much more stable. This is supposed to be Microsoft's flagship OS!
I can't obtain my password from the location I am at. I am Reiko. I have been using win2k for several months, almost 6 months. Win 2000 is AMAZING. It has not crashed at all unless I run it off the road. And believe me I have been in and out of the registry, install 40 - 50 different installable application and had at least 4- 5 rows of tasks running. And the flexability, I will NEVER go back to win98 unless i need to play games. Also I bigtime wish I could figure out Linux. I made 10 attempts over the course of 4 months to install RedHAT and failed misureabley. I got the web server and webclient working. That's it. One day my dream is to get some kinda Windows Linux Web Cluster going.
you would be using them the same number of times, with the exception of ending up on the odd os the last time, so that test wouldnt work for number of times, now TIME-WISE it should work decently, but you are talking WIN NT 4 and not WIN 2000, which i have no personal opinion on at the moment
If you had included an email, I wouldn't have added to the noise level here. I'm not sure what version of XFree86 Corel has stuffed into their distro, but the latest version does support the Rage128 chipset found in the ATI All-in-Wonder 128 cards. I recently installed it on my girlfriend's PC which had the card. --What's up with the login? Is it case-sensitive or isn't it?!!
Most of the issues which PC/NT users have to deal
with only exist because of the awful design legacy
of the PC, Intel's CPUs, Win3.1, NT, and so on
anyway. Several times this week I've come across
articles where someone has described the nightmare
they've had trying to upgrade to NT from an older
MS OS like Win98, yet now MS is forcing businesses
to do it all over again. And what for? So that
users can now use features which other OSs have
had for years!
There's also the related issue of Intel needing
a reason why customers should buy faster CPUs
(speech processing? Gimme a break!
UNIX has its baggage, but after 35 years it's
very well *known* baggage, while Win2K has
thousands of new bugs to contend with. Linux
is young and has a long way to go before it
matches more mature UNIX versions like IRIX, but
its low cost and attraction to those who don't
want to be tied to MS will push it ahead quickly -
eg. the release of XFS and OpenGL to the
open source community, the porting of IRIS
Performer to Linux, the desire for Linux to be
running on IA64, etc. (already demonstrated
on Itanium by SGI).
I bought an SGI Indigo2 2nd-hand in March 1997;
it has *never* crashed. Did that sink in PC/NT
people? I'll say it again - it's NEVER crashed
on me, not once. Not a single error. Same goes
for the O2 I have at home - no crashes or errors
of any kind since I installed IRIX 6.5 in summer
1998. This is why I have 9 SGIs at home and no
PCs.
$30000 in 1993 (250MHz CPU, 2MB L2 cache, 128MB
RAM, 4GB disk, gfx equivalent to a 3Dfx in terms
of shaded triangles/sec, 2 external SCSI ports,
etc.), and it's still working just fine today.
Indigo2 is probably one of the most reliable and
stable hardware computer platforms ever made by
any company. Today, MS has succeeded in making
companies ignore the concept of long term cost
by pushing the cheapo MS-based PC into every
market no matter what the cost.
People who are used to PCs freak out when I show
them the way in which SGIs auto-hardware detect;
no need to mess around with drivers, config
settings, etc. It's *real* plug & play, and
years ahead of MS offerings in terms of dealing
with hardware issues efficiently.
I'm not familiar with other UNIX systems (Sun,
IBM, HP, DEC, etc.) so I can't comment on whether
their equivalent OSs are as friendly as IRIX is.
Linux is somewhere between the mess which is NT
and the high-quality, scalable, reliable, stable,
mature UNIXs like IRIX. It's a shame that Linux
is often installed on PCs which then thrusts
horrible hardware issues into a user's face.
If the Open Source community really can get Linux
into a state where the features I find most
useful about OSs like IRIX are also available
in Linux (eg. totally automated hardware
management), then more power to them I say.
It would certainly hit MS pretty hard since the
way NT handles these issues is awful.
But then, this entire business has never been
about companies like MS ensuring customers make
the "right decision" (as one MS PR piece put it).
MS wants customers to buy MS products; for many
customers, if they're really searching for the
right decision, then the answer is definitely not
a MS solution, but that's not something MS would
ever admit. After all their bloatware, bullying
and bragging, more than half the servers on the
Net still use Apache - something MS dare not
tell prospective customers. The truth is that,
many times, one does not *need* MS or PCs to solve
a problem, though it's certainly a reality that
there's really not much choice when it comes
to office management since most other companies
use Word, Excel, etc. anyway. Sometimes the
logical choice is not the practical choice, eg.
associate companies use a particular platform,
so one must also use that platform due to joint
project management, etc.
I've talked to media graphics companies in the UK
who setup by getting some 2nd-hand SGIs, a few
Linux PCs, and run their entire business using
shareware and freeware. No need to pay MS ten
squillion pounds just to have email and decent
network management.
Blender, BMRT, XV, etc.
Byte magazine once said that NT was only now
solving OS problems which UNIX systems solved more
than a decade ago. That lag continues, but is
getting worse IMO. I recall seeing in PC Pro
or some other mag that the minimum CPU recommended
for Win2K was a PII/266, which is outrageous; in
fact the reviewer said their Win2K beta was slow
even on their PII/450. Compare this to IRIX 6.5.6,
SGI's latest OS release, which runs quite
happily on an R4600PC/133 Indy (the equivalent of
a Pentium60 in main CPU int power). Why does MS
insist on creating software that needs the
equivalent of a Cray just to run up word?
It won't make any difference though, all this
airing of views. Most business don't take the
time or make the effort to investigate the issues
properly. More likely, someone involved in the
decision making process is already PC/NT
brainwashed and so recommends what they know,
whether it's the right decision or not. Obviously,
the same can happen if a Linux fanatic has too
much of a say when in fact the business ought to
be using Office under NT if they want to have a
smooth info-exchange with other companies.
This entire debate gives me the sense that people
somehow think customers are going to be given
'The Truth' by MS if only the subject is talked
about openly enough. Nonsense. Few aspects of the
computing world have progressed on any sensible
basis - the whole of computing history has been
a litany of blunders, mistakes, accidents, etc.
where inferior technologies gain a foothold purely
out of circumstance. The PC itself is the biggest
example of this. Standing in a computer store,
watching the people fussing over their bits
and pieces, hearing assistants talk about DMAs
and IRQs to _ordinary users_, it's clear to me
that the mainstream use of computers today, ie.
the PC, is just one giant bottom-up-hacked mess,
but it won't change (yet) because the companies
just want to make money. It's a business.
Once I had to explain the differing design
legacies of PCs vs. traditional UNIX systems
like SGIs to someone who knew little about
computers. I put it like this:
The PC is designed to give users a certain
'level' of abilities, a set of features, etc.
Hardware suppliers then work out how that set of
features can be made available at the cheapest
possible price for the different markets (biz,
games, etc.), all the while noting just how
much consumers are prepared to pay. This is
what has led to the sub-$1000 PC genre. The
whole approach is bottom-up; the pressure is
for cheap components; the result is a mess
of hardware issues and incompatibilities. The
only benefit to the consumer is apparent
initial low cost (wiped out when their system
fails, or they lose money due to down time,
etc.)
Taking SGIs as a UNIX example, the ethos is
top-down. It could be summed up by the question,
"What can we give our customers for X-thousand
bucks?" This leads to advanced designs and
innovative architectures, high-quality
ergonomics, easier maintenance, and a much
broader feature set (the O2 is probably the
best example of this). But one *pays* for that
quality. I'm just the kind of person who is
happy to pay extra to have a decent system that
is not going to crash on me every 5 minutes like
a PC.
As a newspaper reporter once put it, what the
hell kind of quality do you expect if you're only
going to spend a few hundred $ on a computer?
So, compare away, but don't expect these
discussions to have any effect on MS or the
market at large. MS fanatics probably don't even
read this site, let alone allow themselves to
think objectively about the nonsense that MS is
spouting about Win2K.
Remember folks: "640K ought to be enough for
anybody!" [Gates]
Cheers!
Ian.
mapesdhs@yahoo.com
Doom Help Service (DHS):
http://doomgate.gamers.org/dhs/
SGI/Future Technology/N64:
http://www.futuretech.vuurwerk.nl/
BSc Dissertation (Doom):
http://doomgate.gamers.org/dhs/diss/
"Native Mode" only refers to ActiveDirectory.
That should have nothing to do with 99% of the problems normal NT shops will encounter.
And no way will my (soon to be Win2000) shop will ever run in Native Mode. Non-patched Win9x machines will break. Samba machines will break. The MS LanMan Client DOS Boot Disks we use for installs will break. If we had OS/2 machines, they would break. Old School SMB domain authentication is not going away for a long time.
No, the story wasn't ridiculous. The original post and yours both have it wrong. Read it for yourself, it says that of the 63,000 items in the list, 20,000+ (IIRC) were what we would consider bugs, mostly long-forgotten issues, etc., in other words, the result of sloppy programming and project management. The story stated that those list items that weren't bugs were requests for improvements and other feedback items.
Face it, when you make big promises, can't deliver, have to dump a number of promised features because they're impossibly broken, then still deliver late, you're Microsoft.
slashdot broke my sig
Seeing as both computers had their hard drive crash, BSD can't do much better than the Linux one, unless it's drive was luckier and didn't break. ;) But four hours to change it? That seems to me they didn't have a backup ready to go with the identical OS preloaded. It wouldn't need more than about a half hour to open a case and swap them out. So it sounds like they also had to do some sort of restore from backup, tape drive perhaps...
This was only a summary of the report. Look at the URL, it's not bloor-research.com. It took me under two minutes to follow the link to bloor-research.com, click on "Bloor Interactive," and enter Linux in the search box. Top on the list is this study. If you want the full study, as with many of these sort of papers, you'll have to pay the $81US.
The fact that Linux scales as far down as a Palm Pilot is not really relevant. The fact that it scales down very well to some other systems, like 486s, is very relevant. An old 486 with 16MB of RAM can be a very useful Linux system.
---
I would have to give the edge to solaris. It can withstand the equivalent of a nuclear bomb blast, but it's so damn slow that it'd take 15 minutes to tell whether the damn thing had crashed or was operating normally. So I use Linux and not solaris, with the understanding that Linux may crash in some circumstances solaris would survive. These rarely occur, however.
If in fact identical hardware was used, they must have been exceedingly lucky with that used on the linux system. Why? Simple - a true hardware failure will crash the system. Every. Single. Time. If it's a survivable problem (single-bit error, timing glitch, scsi error, failure of non-system disk, etc), then a crash brought on by it is a software problem and cannot be attributed to hardware. So I find it hard to believe that the nt system had 68 times as many hardware failures. Either, as I said, they were exceedingly lucky, or 68 more crashes should be blamed on enntee, not hardware problems. A crash caused by a nonfatal hardware problem is not a hardware problem at all. It's the responsibility of the os to handle hardware problems as gracefully as possible. This means that other than hard, undetectable memory or processor errors (a three-bit error, a cooling problem, etc), pretty much nothing should cause a system crash. Linux does a decent, but not great, job of recovering from hardware problems. I have no idea how well enntee recovers from them because every time I've used it it's killed itself so quickly it's impossible to tell what caused the problem. Linux will at least dump an oops or panic if at all possible, but enntee seems to just freeze up most of the time.
- epox kp6-bx (dual PII) board
- two celeron 400 cpu's
- 128 meg RAM,/li>
- adaptec u2w scsi card
- voodoo III 2000 agp
- sblive value!
- linksys 10/100/fast nic
- lvd scsi cd-rom
- scsi hard disk
- ide hard disk
With Windows 98 I had no end of problems that I couldn't explain. If I tried changing cd's, I had to reboot because the machine would lock (despite disabling autorun). After I installed 3dfx's upgrade drivers, the system refused to wake on mouse or wake on lan when it went to sleep. When the power went out (which, for a 4-month period, seemed to be every couple days), Windows would be completely jacked. It did things like make the opening sound clip "stutter." I reinstalled it twice during that period because it was convinced that certain hardware/software wasn't there/didn't work (especially the nic (of which, the first really was fubar (thanks Alabama Power), and the replacement was ok)).Linux, by contrast performs wonderfully. When it went down during the 4-month period, it made me sit through the standard "you didn't shut down properly--checking disks" routine, but after that, everything worked like a charm. I have no problems with the scsi cd, either. I recently managed a 24-day uptime, (my longest ever
Of course, there are tradeoffs. My sound card works a lot better under Windows (I still haven't figured out how to get emu101k to compile for smp), and I've had problems with Palm and Rio utilities. On the whole, though, I'm much happier now that I'm running one OS (Linux), and not fighting Windows every time I want to accomplish something.
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
That's funny - the very bottom of the article says: "Copyright © Frans Godden. This story was first published in the January 2000 edition of ID-side." Perhaps you could submit an article now about what the stock market did in 2001 - I know I'd like to know.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
"This is the proof we have been looking for! Escher is alive and well, and living in a bit-bucket at MIT."
News of the discovery quickly spread, but faied to get passed the infinite waterfall or the perpetual stairs.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
IIS runs as a service under NT4.
On those occasions that it refuses to shut down (say when I've some new code and one of my ISAPI threads won't terminate), I always found attaching the debugger and killing it in that worked!
it sounds like many of the problems could have been related to whatever hardware they picked.
Damm! That sure is a tired old line.
Windows NT works great but some people run it on crappy hardware.
and the next one they try is
It's not NT! It's the Admin that can't cut it! Get a qualified person to run NT.
The newest one they use is that NT is more SECURE cause it's closed. Nice try Guys!
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
If you had to reboot NT more than 68 times, you're simply an incompetent moron.
That's why I use Linux. It avoids emberassment and allows me to be productive. No reboots. No lost data. No reinstalls. No excuses.
I've found linux to be more reliable than NT in my own experience, but the study is to me meaningless unless I see it for myself. I'm not surprised they found linux more reliable, but I couldn't use it as evidence for anything. That's not quite true, since they do give hard numbers on how many failures each system had. The problem is that they don't tell you what hardware they have, or what the machines were doing, or anything important like that.
;)
It would be cool if somebody who has a copy of the report umm, posted some of it somewhere
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
... and that's not a joke. Each time it caused much hilarity at work, but eventually we got tired of the fun and just reformatted all the "company standard O/S's" into Linux, and we've never looked back since.
Apart from NT, I've never known any other system to crash while in its idle loop.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Interesting how the difference in availability between 4 hours and 65 hours of downtime is a meager .69%. 99.99% availability represents a total downtime of 52 minutes per year, or 8.6 seconds per day.
But think about what those extra 61 hours of downtime will cost you if you're an e-business site.
Look, you have to change your frame of reference. I see everyone doing cost/benefit analyses, uptime/reboot ratios, etc. for NT4. Why? Windows 2000 is very loosely based on the NT4 codebase. I mean, hell, they actually introduced another 65,000 bugs, so you know that there's a lot of new stuff in there. To be honest, I've found it quite stable, and I'm using Build 2072, which is 100+ builds from the last release candidate. There's probably 130,000 bugs in that version, yet it hasn't crashed for me once. Neither has Linux. In other words, I've found them to be equally stable. Windows and Linux. How's that for strange?
I'm not saying that Win2K is as stable as Sun, and probably not even as stable as Linux in general, but you shouldn't write it off so quickly. I mean that in two ways: first, if you're looking for a good, easy to use server, give 2000 a try, and also, for the rest of us, we need to beware of the threat that Windows 2000 poses. A lot of the shortcomings which inveterate Linux advocates use as cannon fodder aren't there anymore. I've always used Linux because I believe in open standards and Open Source, and it would be a shame to see Windows 2000 gain ground, what with Microsoft's usage of exactly the opposite.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Right on. I noticed that immediately in the study as well - for all we know one of those machines was kept in one of the tech's homes w/o AC down south over a hot summer while the other one was in a proper climate-controlled environment. The results would most definately differ in such a situation.
Look, I've been running Solaris, NT and Linux servers in production environments for 5 years now, and I know for a fact that Linux (and Solaris) are many orders of magnitude more reliable than NT, even (indeed, especially) under heavy loads and multiple concurrent applications.
But this "article"? This isn't a report. It's not research. It's some freelance mom-and-pop computer consultant who works out of his spare bedroom comparing two old machines he set up in a corner of the dining room. Gimme a break. This is no better than the amateur cheese Linux Journal publishes. In fact, I'll bet they'll be reprinting this in a month or two.
Now that Oracle, Sybase, Informix, IBM, BEA, iPlanet and others have supported products for all three of these OSes, doing apples-to-apples comparisons is easy. Enough with comparing PHP-on-Linux to ASP-on-NT and benchmarking NT on Apache. Let's see what an identical mix of Domino, DB2 and Websphere with IBM's recommended settings can do on identical dual-CPU, major-vendor rackmount servers and be done with it.
Today's hardware is very powerful, simple servers like low-usage web servers, email servers, and file servers just don't need the latest 1GHZ machine. Simple machines like the Netwinder (I have NO clue how that performs as a high-usage content server, please don't read into that) can do the job fine. However, to get a simple Windows product that is comperable, you need to scale down to CE. Even if you were to scale down to a 386 (~$15) to do some simple stuff, that is much cheaper than a "Palm Pilot". Server != big machine.
>But to make it a good game...we'd have to agree on something that actually beats M$.
You mean, something that M$ beats?
If so, how about the frustrated sysadmin, who has been trying to keep the NT box from going down for last 6 days?
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I don't usually pull this "moderator baiting" crap, but this comment deserves attention. Drix is right on the money, and in fact maybe a little more than s/he realizes. We're competing with NT when the real competition with Linux is Solaris and Windows 2000. If we want to produce a better OS than Microsoft, we need to produce a better OS than Windows 2000, not a better os than Windows NT or Windows 95.
Finding God in a Dog
Lab studies like this mean nothing. What matters is running the server in a production environment. My NT server has run for almost a year now since one of it's drives failed in March last year. Before that it had put in another year. NT on my server is really quite stable. The applications on it? Well that's another story. They crash all the time. :-) On the other hand on of my fellow admin's NT servers has to be restarted almost daily due to an NT problem. (Same Compaq box to). I really do hate studies like this.
I'm pleased with a 1 year uptime. I won't change. On the other hand if I was my buddy I would change to Linux or some other OS that met my real world needs better.
Many businesses still run "old machines" like Pentiums. They are fast enough for many tasks and they don't have the money to buy everyone new machines. Their reliability is usually very good.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
No -- Stimuli's got a point. Even though NT4 is single user only, all the Admin tools are multiuser and use RPC only.
It is also impossible to boot an NT machine with attempting to start all the "Automatic" services. I've had situations where the machine would boot, but you couldn't log in locally because winlogon.exe had died, and there was no other NT machine on the network with which to fix this problem. One cries for a unix-style "single user mode" in these situations. (And, no, the Win2K "Safe Mode" still sucks!)
I think regedit.exe (not regedt32.exe) runs directly against the local registry, that might be a solution. Of course, regedit.exe is not supported for editing on NT4. Catch-22.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Reliability(Linux on x86) is greater than Reliability(Solaris x86) -- Driver support and hardware oddities make Solaris/Intel difficult to deal with.
(And I have proven this using a compaq machine that is right on Sun's HCL.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
If the "old Pentium machine" was something like a Compaq Proliant 4500, it shouldn't be a problem.
When NT 4 shipped these were the 'premiere' machines to run it on, and IIRC, Microsoft still uses quite a few of them for web serving.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I don't have a link handy, but a month or two ago InfoWorld (print) published a pie chart showing the causes for NT failures incident.
The interesting thing was that "Internal NT problem" was just as likely to cause a failure as "Hardware/Drivers"
The *more* interesting thing is that the data was from Microsoft. (I really wish I had a link handy!)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
This is the source of most crashes.
Not on any of the (hundreds) of NT boxes I've had the pleasure to run. 99% of the BSODS are NTFS.SYS or the SCSI or NIC driver, or a memory parity error. Of course, ususally the box just goes to shit without BSODding and needs to be rebooted, but that's usually a background service problem with nothing to do with the GUI.
I have to think that you've swollowed a line by saying this -- Unix users think that GUI-in-the-kernel is bad (OK, maybe that's true). But then you jump to the "logical" conclusion that that is why NT is not-so-stable. Sorry, the evidence doesn't back you up.
{I've only seen NT Server crash once on the video driver -- and the box stayed up. It was NT3.51 with the user mode GUI, of course. }
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
This article really doesn't say a whole lot - it doesn't even give any numbers except for downtime. Can anyone find the actual statistics of the study? They didn't provide a link to them, and I can't find it on Bloor's website. It's going to take a little more than the information in this report to convince me, and most anyone else except for current Linux users, to use Linux in a corporate setting.
The one good point in the article, though, was that neither Linux nor NT are suitable for enterprise environments.
-lx
NT 3.51 was pretty reliable. But when M$ ported the Win95 GUI over to NT, it ran so slow they had to change it so the GUI in kernel mode instead of user mode. This is the source of most crashes.
Now that Slashdot has deep pockets, the editors ought to purchase commercial reports like this and spill the beans.
It's no copyright violation if the contents are paraphrased.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. -Albert Einstein
The thrust of the article seeemed by about using the various OSes as servers... So why in the world does Linux score points for being able to scale downward to run on a Palm Pilot, where as with Windows, you have to choose CE? That means absolutely nothing to the target market.
Actually, you're right. Many of the Windows NT problems are related to application issues. (Of course, some would see this as an inherent weakness of the OS; depending on the circumstance, that may be a deciding factor.)
I was recently at a Microsoft Partners function that was attended by three Windows 2000 developers. One of them discussed specifically the question of why Windows/IIS web servers needed to be rebooted so often. Here's (approximately) what he said: "We found that they weren't always rebooting because they needed to, but because they wanted it to happen under their control, not when the machine decided it was needed. When we examined the problems, we found most of them were within IIS itself, relating to locked files and non-terminating scripts. Under Windows 2000, IIS runs as a service that you can stop and start by itself without rebooting the OS, and you can schedule it to happen when you want."
So, in essence, they worked around the problem by providing a more robust solution. Now you can schedule your web services to automatically shut down and restart themselves, without a time-consuming hardware reboot.
I can say from using both W2K Professional (beta) and Server (gold) that it's far more robust than Windows NT 4.0. You could always achieve good reliability with NT by carefully limiting your choice of hardware and running only software that was needed, but that's no longer going to be as necessary. I still have my beefs with Microsoft, but reliability isn't going to be nearly as high on the list as it used to.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Comparing Linux to NT isn't quite as fair as comparing NT to 98 or Linux 2.2.3 to 1.3.2. I mean they are completely different OS structures and are both programmed in different ways. They're both called to perform the same task but their differences make them hard to actually compare. With Linux you can customize the kernel to fit your hardware exactly, NT has to be run on the hardware right out of the box. If you compared NT to 98 it would kick its ass, same with comparing an older Linux kernel with the newest ones.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
hey thanks! (pun intended) I didn't know about 'apropos', I will assuredly check it out.
/etc)
WRT to #3: agreed, but first you have to *find* the configuration files which took me awhile.
(for the onlookers: look in
-matt
You need to get over the hump; bro. A lot of your problem is probably learning where the docs are (they're there a plenty, just not in an expensively bound, nicely printed manual). You've also got to expect to pay some dues and learning how a different system works.
I'm in the position of the first poster, but not quite as disheartened (yet). While your response is meant to be encouraging (and it is), it would be even more cheering if it was informative. Eg. the FM is 'right here'. That you couldn't point to a location in your response is a concise illustration of the problem itself.
Anyway, I'm confident that the passage of time and a few million eyballs and few thousand hands documenting the eyeball travails will alleviate the situation. It's just that "instant gratification" is sufficiently engrained in me that I don't want to wait. {smiles}
-matt
Also, they said old Pentiums were used. Would comparing the two operating systems on such old machines be a fair comparison?
Of course, as long as both os'es was tested with the same kind of hardware. Old pentiums are as reliable as new machines. No problem there, they are slow though. Slowness is not a reliability problem. Crashes are, and the old machines don't crash in much different ways than new ones. Not that it matters much, <B>both</B> os'es ran the old hw, any hw problem inherent in old machines would strike both.
Linux failed once in this test, no need for NT to fail much more except if it really is worse.
I'm normally on the side of Linux in most arguments, but it's possible that a Linux distro may have a similar number of flaws at any one time as Windows 2K. [Note that I'm referring to distribution rather than version of Linux].
I'm willing to bet that by the time you add up currently open bugs in XFree, KDE, Gnome, sendmail, nntp, Linux itself, the GNU utilities, compilers etc etc etc, you end up with a number certainly in the thousands.
It may be regarded as unfair to mention problems with these apps in the same breath as problems with the OS itself, but I'm willing to bet that some of the 63000 bugs in W2K include problems with Solitaire, Minesweeper and all the other cruft that makes it a rounded package.
On the good side, I am willing to believe that in Linux most of these problems will have less effect on the smooth running of the rest of the system.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
You obviously missed yesterday's story about a Microsoft memo outlining 65,000 bugs in Windows 2000.
My journal has hot
> I think this is prety much what most people would expect from WinNT 4.
Gee. And it only seems like yesterday that we were hearing how NT4 was the best thing since sliced bread.
> It doesnt have a chance against Linux - any distribution.
So. Now that W63K is (almost) out, you don't feel obligated to believe the Mindcraft benchmarks anymore?
> Windows 2000, however, is quite a different story.
Different bugs, but same old story.
> I'd be very interested to see a similar test performed between Windows 2000 and maybe Debian.
We eagerly await it as well.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Okay. I use both NT & Linux as servers. Have for many years. And here is my offered Expert opinion.
Regardless of whatever 'studies', or nit-picking.....
THe big problem is... NT likes to crash when you update software. When you try something new. It wants you to reboot all the time. This may seem normal to NT admins, but really... my VA Server has been rebooted ONCE in the last year, and that's because we had a 24 hour power outage. There is absolutely NO reason to reboot it, unless you are doing hardware modification, or absolutely need to update a driver (which amounts to hardware...) This is the single biggest reason it makes a good server. You can run multiple diferent server applications on it, and work on one without risking the others. In NT, this practice is suicide.
My last customer was using Exchange Servers (2)
I am sure that some people have success with MS Exchange.
However my experience has been that it is CRAP.
My employer (a large multinational with about 30,000 employees world wide) uses exchange for both email and group applications.
The problems with this are legion. Exchange has a workable client for ONE and only ONE OS. Guess which. If you a non-Windows user, forget it. It's proprietary out the wazoo. There is a client for the Mac, but it is missing so many features compared to the Windows client you might as well forget it.
The servers we have are go through periods of unbelievable flakyness. Sometimes they will work fine for a few months. However if the 'troubles' start, forget it. The servers will be up and down for weeks at a time. And when they are up they will act as if they are running on a Commodore 64, not a high end Compaq server.
It has gotten to the point a couple of times where my company has threatened to sue Microsoft because of these reliability issues. Twice Microsoft flew engineers out from Redmond to try to try to get the systems working normally. Didn't make any difference.
I cannot believe that people use MS Exchange as an enterprise mail system of this nature. I think you would be MUCH better off with a Sendmail plus NNTP.
I read a statement that the attackers were obviously knowledgeable about both Unix and networks.
That suggests to me that the attackers were able to plant their zombie programs on Unix machines but not on NT ones.
I think that is nonsense. It's like something that Microsoft would post as a reason for buying NT in a FUD campaign.
There are plenty of programs like L0pht and BO 2000 that will turn your NT box into a zombie. The number of people that have had their Windows 9x machines compromised after putting them on a cable modem is legendary.
The link you read wasn't the study - it was an article, written by a reporter, outlining the major points of the study.
Man, calm down... If these little details bother you so much, go out and drop a few grand to buy the actual study. That _is_ how these gruops operate, ya know? They don't just give away the fruit of their labours.
What you've read is akin to that new bestseller's blurb in your local paper - you can't pick apart the plot line based on that. You want to right to complain about details, go and buy the book!
before everyone gets all pissed off at Bloor, let's all look at the URL on that page.
Huh?... Wait a second! This is from a NEWS SITE (and not a very reputable or technically inclined one, at that). That article is not the report. The report, if it's a typical Bloor report, will be a three hundred page monster that includes serial numbers for the hardware used and core dumps of every application fault.
This is some reporter's sypnosis of the Bloor report, and as such will obviously cut down on the detail. Maybe it's not enough for you. But maybe it's enough to convince a few CIO's out there to purchase the actual report and see how the products compare.
You can't criticize the report until you've actually seen it.
Notice they don't say what exactly constitues a memory problem. I've had memory problems that cause crashes all the time (I like to call them segment violations) that are caused by single-bit errors in my memory.
Linux, however, will terminate a program with such a fault. Six times out of ten (in my purely anecdotal experience), NT will require a reboot for a segv in a non-trivial app. That is an important thing to look at for anyone considering using either of these two as servers.
If I ssh into my webserver to do some remote admin, and I segv linuxconf (as if I'd use it, but...), I can be safe in the knowledge that Apache is still running.
Ever crashed the remote admin stuff on NT? You take down one Backoffice App, and they all go on sympathy strike.
People running servers in the real world need to know these things.
That's not a study. Two machines, with no details about hardware, and they're trying to draw conclusions from that? Be real; that's less useful than the infamous NT vs. linux study everyone was up in arms about.
Be rigorous. It's good for the soul and it prevents people from laughing at you.
I've been Beta testing it since November, and I have to admit I'm impressed... but it was only more stable when compared to my NT and 98 stations.
It was much easier to set up then WinNT 4 or SuSe, didn't crash on install the way 98 does (it usually takes me 3+ reinstalls to complete an install of 98)
I like the interface, I like the new Admin control layout, and I like that appears (to my eye) to run faster then NT.
However, I usually have at least one crash a week that requires a reboot, and three or four crashes a week (usually Netscape) that just require restarting the App.
Incidently (and this is in no way in disparagement of W2k) when Iomega says "We do not currently support beta OS's like w2k" what they are really saying is "Please, Please, For the love of God do not install this on your W2k machine yet!"
16 hours later I got the OS back... and now I know how to fix it, but still...
I've had great success running games I didn't expect to run (Descent 3 & Alien Crossfire)
Not so great success running games I really wanted to run (Mechwarrior 3 & Carmageddon)
Applications that I expected to run (3d Studio Max 2.5) didn't... but I think that may have been due to a lack on OpenGL support.
However Photoshop runs great...
I just got the Final realease... we'll se how is does as a web server up against my Suse machine...
*A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer.*
From the article:
"Bloor Research had both operating systems running on relatively old Pentium machines."
Uhhh, hello? Am I the only one who laughs at a study that purports to judge the reliability of two operating systems based on how they ran on two machines that aren't even new off-the-rack? Yeah, I know that we all use old machines to run Linux for all kinds of uses, but this isn't how we're going to win over the community.
If someone tested a cancer cure on two people, one who got a placebo and one who got the real thing, I wouldn't go by their "research." They'd be tossed out of the medical community.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, but let's not go trumpeting this as a success for the Linux community. We'd look like idiots. All the Windoze people have to say is, "Great. Now let's try the same thing on six new identical machines with redundant power supplies and drive arrays, just like you would do with a critical server in the real world."
What's your damage, Heather?
If you would just type "go" at the PROM, it would pick up right where it left off...
Java Web Application Development http://www.thinkobject.co
NT has various memory leaks, it has to be restarted or will eventually crash. It could be the apps that are causing it, but it is the apps that give NT all it's functionality so that's no excuse.
+&x
umm 16X is a bit more than luck. If you don't believe this test I have a quick excercise for you to do. Install a dual boot NT/Linux box, when one crashes switch to the other. At the end of the year tell me which one you used more.
+&x
I reboot all our NT machines at least once a week (52 times/yr). If you don't they'll take care of it themselves...
+&x
you can "assume" if you want, but you're the only one who believes it. The ONE and ONLY failure for linux was the HD, causeing a four hour downtime. If replacing a harddrive on a linux machine is roughly akin to replacing one on an NT machine..you rcan remove one crash and four hours from both results. So now, Linux was not down at all and NT was down for 61 hours, ie. Linux is infinitely more stable than NT.
We can't assume a damn thing, but it's nice to see a study (rather than a press release) that backs up what has been my real-life experience.
+&x
Maybe Windows just stresses out the hardware more and causes itself to crash because of that?
Count this be because of the difference between programming in a theoretical environment(i.e. Redmond) and programming in a real-world environment (i.e. the real world)?
Did ESR cover this in CaTB?
+&x
Agreed. Linux has replaced Windows for me on the server and the desktop. I'm quite happy. I have found everything I need in the Linux world (except for Starcraft!...). What the hell do I care what everyone else uses?
The only time I feel compelled to get into these arguments is with a boss that thinks Redmond is synonymous with Mt. Olympus. I don't usually work at places like that long.
Remember, one of the major "selling points" of SP3 (aside from the fact that it replaced *shudder* SP2) was that it rebooted "50% faster". :)
Which is actually very useful if you're using NT as a workstation, and you do environmentally conscious things like turning the machine off at night when no-one's using it...
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
at the command line, getting crap like RTFM (when, in fact, there is no definitive M), and trying to configure ridiculously obfuscated network settings, I'm ready to go back to windows.
You need to get over the hump; bro. A lot of your problem is probably learning where the docs are (they're there a plenty, just not in an expensively bound, nicely printed manual). You've also got to expect to pay some dues and learning how a different system works. It's like learning a new (human) language -- some of its logical, but a lot of its arbitrary; it's important to realize that your native language is pretty arbitrary too. It takes a while until you start thinking in the new language. Until that point, you will seem dumber than you are in your native language.
That's what linux is missing, and may never have. In windows 9x, a few clicks and a reboot is all it takes to get a workstation on the network. It's basically the same with NT, just a little more technical, for control purposes. In linux, you have to ensure the the damned OS works with most of the hardware in your box, then play with text files all day until you think you've got it.
Don't mix up your learning curve with the cost of installation. When you get into more of a production mode, Linux installs are really much easier. For example, you are complaining about using text files, but what kind of configuration could be easier than copying the relevant files, which in 99% of the cases can be identical? If you are doing a lot of them, you can simply script the whole thing; which beats having to check every few seconds on whether the computer is waiting for your click. Of course, as you point out, the hardest thing is going to be supporting oddball hardware. All hardware manufacturers provide Windows drivers, but Linux drivers are provided by people who want the device to work under Linux. The upshot is that you're in trouble if you like to bottom fish for a completely different set of the cheapest components you can find on every new box you do. So, go with quality hardware, and try to standardize your boxes; or at least check beforehand to see if the ISA slot modem you're installing is supported.
but at least it has friendly support (you people could work on this one), copious amounts of software, and configures with just a few clicks of the mouse button
Well, I for one have found the free Linux support more friendly and responsive than commercial tech support I'm paying good $$ for. But, you have to remember it's free. This means putting your sweat equity into fixing your own problem first, and then taking the effort writing a clear and concise description of what you are trying to do and where you got stuck, with the minimum amount of bitching about how stupid Linux must be because you already know how to do this on Windows. In other words, make it easy and pleasant for someone to help you.
If you come to the table with a chip on your shoulder (as users of commercial support feel they are entitled to do), then you will get your rudeness shoved right back at you (you might not be aware that you are being rude, but ask anyone who's worked tech support).
So brush up on the charm. It used to be that computers were a haven for people too socially maladjusted to function anywhere else. No more!
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well, no. Only your domain controllers have to be Win2k to run in native mode. And native mode doesn't really buy you most of the "strong points". What you probably meant to say is that you have to have Win2k on the desktop to get a lot of the nifty stuff. Which means that there's going to be a long, long transition time for most organizations.
Linux is a unix. in general most unix users inherently like other unixes. even if BSD would get lots of heat from linux (as they already do)..its still a unix. i dont really care who wins - as long as its a unix based derivative.
yup. actually solaris is fairly rock solid and ive never had it crash on me (same said for linux and OSF/1..unfortunately not for IRIX). solaris *does* make you reboot more often (things like replacing a keyboard on a sparc box causes it to go to the PROM and hang...and various other socket binding problems and other shit with javawebserver etc etc.
i would if it actually accepted keystrokes. unfortunately it doesnt seem to. so i cant type go :(. any other ideas ?
I've seen this, and by the way, all those fancy GUI admin tools, including the control panel's 'services' applet, use RPC in some form or another. I'd stop the guilty service from loading if only I could :)
I wonder if the MICRO~1 engineers have ever heard of "single user mode"?
"So like if a new device were to come along, the manufacturer could write a driver without any NT source"
This is because MS does not want to give their source every tom dick and harry who wants to write driver. I really don't see it as an advantage. You can get the source for Linux and can't get it for NT therefore they have different developement models.
War is necrophilia.
"Not, how do you explain the thousands of drivers for NT?"
The reason there are thousands of drivers for NT is because Ms has a monopoly not because the drivers are easier to develop. Also Nt has been around for a long time now and Linux is just starting to get popular. In a couple of years both will have the same number of drivers.
War is necrophilia.
With 28,000 known (real) bugs before release and some unknown number of undiscovered bugs lurking in the software, how many do you think there really are?
My guess is that there are more than one undiscovered real bug for each known bug. Even that (conservative) guess would put the minimum number of real bugs right around the 64K number.
Realistically, however, there are likely to be far more than one unknown bug for each known one at this stage in W2K's life. But enough of my guesses. How would you estimate the number of real bugs likely to be lurking in W2K?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
I submitted this as a Slashdot story about a year ago, alongside a different computer journal article from people that actually got fresh news, rather than dead meat.
Possibly why the story was rejected then was because Bloor Research could have said *ANYTHING* about Linux - you have to pay to read the report. Other institutions (VNU Labs, Ziff Davis) have produced just as important research, made it freely available through various media formats, and are probably as reputable, if not MORE reputable, than Bloor Research.
It seems Bloor Research (who heard of them before today) have got more promotion from simply doing ANY report on Linux, than they have created for themselves in the past. Yup, they're just jumping on that old bandwagon.
insignificant sig
A competent person or organization would have removed windows before the 68th reboot. And probably before the first, too.
Look, why do we always insist on arguing about silly things like this. Emacs vs. ViM, Mutt vs. Pine, Linux vs. everything. Goddamit! IMHO you should tell people your likes and dislikes about a particular package, and then let them decide. It is hardly productive to flame. That makes people resentful. Linux will never replace windows on the desktop, but that's o.k. It is meant for other things just as ViM is meant for different things than emacsen. Don't you guys ever get tired of these old arguments?
"If you love someone, set them free. If they come home, set them on fire." - George Carlin
Wait till it's up against win2k, 99% odd problems!
I am troubled by the denial-of-service attacks against Yahoo and others this month.
I read a statement that the attackers were obviously knowledgeable about both Unix and networks.
That suggests to me that the attackers were able to plant their zombie programs on Unix machines but not on NT ones.
I think that Linux is superior because it is GPL's and one rarely if ever needs to buy software for it.
But I am not sure that Linux or Unix are more secure than NT. The current denial-of-service attacks which apparently exploit Unix security holes suggests that Unix and therefore Linux may NOT be more secure than NT.
Marjo Wycam, Master of the Programming Arts
With only 63,000+ bugs known about BEFORE it's release to the public, I think don't think win2k stands much of a chance either.
Assuming they ran the same hardware on both machines (OK, I know that to assume it's a fair & scientific test might be unrealistic), then it shouldn't matter - linux had the same 'problems' to cope with.
Maybe windows is just good at trying to blame the hardware for it's faults?
This article doesn't summarize the result, doesn't give some numbers.
How can that be serious ?
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
"Both operating systems running on relatively old Pentium machines" != "Two machines, one running NT, one running Linux"
As far as I could tell from a quick re-scanning of the article, there was no indication of exactly how many machines there were. But they didn't say there were two, they said that the study used "relatively old Pentium machines."
Wherever there's a will, there's a motorway.
The article doesn't say that there's only two machines. (It says something along the lines of "both operating systems were tested on old Pentium machines", not that "there were two machines, one running NT, one running Linux".) It actually doesn't say how many machines were in the study, IIRC.
Wherever there's a will, there's a motorway.
Fuck emacs and vi!!!! PICO ALL THE WAY BABEEE!! or notepad...
lol hahahahahaha
go ahead moderate the shit outta me.. I am in a foul wit today
1
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
>There's this amazing thing, we don't have to
>recompile the kernel to remove a feature!
Neither do we, because of kernel modules.
If I want to remove my network card driver, I just say 'rmmod eepro100'. The same goes for file systems, binary executable formats etc.
As far as I can tell the functional difference between NT and Linux kernels in this respect is small, even though NT is a "modified microkernel" architechture and Linux is "monolithic".
Unlike NT, Linux does not even need to be rebooted when you do this.
Does anyone know if they did run identical test beds?
Anyone have a list of what they used?
Thanks.
- "Yeah man, I tell ya what, man...That dang ol' Internet, man...You just go one there and point and click...Talk about
I think this has got to be the first comparison i have seen that doesn't focus on windows being so much easier to configure and its wonderful gui. Score one for them because the gui is irrelevant for the server, it does nothing but east resources.
:)
I also really enjoyed the paragraph about the "subversive use of linux". I set up linux/samba on a dell where i had to blow away nt server first. my boss is still unaware that it is not an nt machine
Remember, one of the major "selling points" of SP3 (aside from the fact that it replaced *shudder* SP2) was that it rebooted "50% faster". :)
:)
As per Ballmer, IIRC..
Addison
Um, no.....it was orignally supposed to be released in the 4th quarter of 1998....
I'm not feeling that clever this morning.
Thats something I would like to know too. This is useless if we can't see how the tests were conducted. I don't want to show this to my boss (who wants a NT server), if I can't back it up!
Ringlord
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Plus, if the attackers were more familiar with *nix, they probably wouldn't have tried to crack NT boxes.
There is nothing saying a Windows box can't be more secure than a *nix box or vice versa. It all depends on the admin in charge of security doing their job.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
yes, oversight on my part.
I don't agree with that. Hardware problems are hardware problems. Chances are Linux got away with it cause Linux never bothered to use any advanced features of the hardware. For example, there are tonnes of IDE controllers and chipset drivers that come from various manufacturers for NT. Now, I'm not saying this is a software/driver problem, what I'm saying is that these drivers could for example do some special new fangled call to the hardware, that could cause the hardware to lock up, get into an unstable state etc. Windows tends to be more 'bleeding' edge because of the huge hardware manufacturer support, while Linux most of the time runs vanilla chipset drivers. That's just one example, but i think it's a valid one.
Explain, what is a default kernel in linux "moron".
NT kernel is optimized all the time, we have ring0 drivers, vxds etc. We don't have a monolithic kernel you know. That's what this thread was about...not installing the right drivers. There's this amazing thing, we don't have to recompile the kernel to remove a feature!
NT has a very nice driver model. So like if a new device were to come along, the manufacturer could write a driver without any NT source. As an example (this is 2.0.x) I had to recompile with ipfw options to get ipmasq and ipfwadm to work. with win95 and an unmodified kernel, you can write NAT. Anyway....my point was not to say that Linux "can't" do these things, but was to say that just cause you don't have NT source doesn't mean you can't "optimize" the "kernel/drivers". I know Linux has kernel modules.
Um, so you're saying that Linux doesn't need a decent driver model and abstract because they can always get the source? Uh no. Manufacturers just want a nice DDK, read the docs, get some examples, and do it.
Not, how do you explain the thousands of drivers for NT?
Why don't you look at the DDK for once, much nicer than what linux has...which is take the code and if you can't do it you're a stupid idiot.
Memory problems under NT are seldom hardware.
Developing under NT and Linux I find that code
which seg-faults under Linux often runs under
NT. NT frequently allows code to access at least
some memory it hasn't allocated. Needless to say,
this leads to memory problems. This also, IMHO,
shows the claim that "it is NT applications which
cause the trouble, not NT itself", in a different
light, as, although this is partly true, Linux
wouldn't give the applications enough slack to
cause the same number of memory leaks.
Savant
I think this is a pretty good point -- how would it fare against win2k? Is anyone planning such a study?
But all you people can reply with is the 63,000 bugs thing! It's like all microsoft haters in the world unite over one ZDnet article!
The whole *POINT* of doing such a test would be to see if FUD like that was at all substantiated. Saying "nah, there's no point. It wouldn't be any different -- look at how buggy it is!!!" is besides the point!
What's the most recent linux bug count, out of curiosity?
-------------
The following sentence is true.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
MS has been claiming unix is dead for more than 15 years, and they continue to try and convince people that they must make a choice between Linux/Unix and NT.
The real issue here is conectivity and interoperablility. When comparing OSs, look for one that "plays well with each other"(netBSD vs free BSD vs Redhat). micros~1 has spent millions and gone *way* out of their way, time and time again, to put barriers between unix and windows, then marketing the differance in the marketplace, asking users to "choose". This fucked-up aproach adds to the TCO (Total cost of ownership) of window~1
So, the short answer to the question is both operating systems have their place.
1)window~1: clueless newbies
2)unix: serious internetworking
The real question is which unix is best for me?
_________________________
I found it quite humorous that the previous story today was about Microsoft touting NT as the replacement for Sun machines.
So I'd really like to know.. which is it? UNIX (yes, i know linux isn't exactly a unix.. but let's not split hairs here) or NT?
---
rJames.org - illustration
Even if they ran the same "crap" for both tests, it's still not a reasonable test. Linux just got luckier that it didn't fail.
--
<rant>No, what's tired is people like you who can't apply rational thought to the article at hand. All you can do is parrot the conventional wisdom that that article must be correct if it draws the conclusion that Linux is better, while an article is crap if draws the conclusion that NT is better. If you're so blind that you can't see that this test was horribly done, then pull your head out of the advocacy sand. You just make the whole Linux advocacy look like fools.</rant>
I now return you to your regularly schedule Microsoft bashing.
--
umm We don't know how long the NT box was down because of the hardware failures. Since the average came down to almost 1 hour/crash, we can assume that the hardware replacement took up most of that time.
--
What kind of crap hardware were they running? Not to necessarily defend NT, but it sounds like many of the problems could have been related to whatever hardware they picked.
--
What crashed? Netscape pukes all over itself on my machine on a regular basis, but that's Netscape's problem, not Linux. Tell me: what crashed, exactly? Did it take down the OS? If it was an application, then I am sure it did not; and that is the major difference I've seen between Linux and NT. I've had buggy programs crash on me all the time in Linux, but the OS itself (the kernel) has not once died on me.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
Indeed. My box crashed yesterday when it really shouldn't have. I mean, if this amateur OS can't run when the power's out, how can anyone claim that it's reliable?
I think the first crash happened in the local power-supply company.
I think I could have made this a bit clearer in my original post: There was a power-cut here at the weekend. What with having no UPS on my box, it went down.
Corresponding with your experience, I've never had Linux itself die on me. I was hoping for a champion uptime before the weekend, but then the power went off.
If reliability(NT) > reliability(Sun), does it then logically follow that reliability(Linux) > reliability(Sun)?
We used it for playback of MPEG 1 video, along with storage and database (SQL server) aplications. For the most part, the playback boxes and DB servers never seemed to burp, and it was usually hardware related. However, the software for the encoder station seemed to crash all the time. I'm sure the code running the encoder had some bugs that violated something in the OS. Now, I'm sure that if the OS was more strict about coding and what the application could get away with, there would have been fewer problems.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Linux is more reliable that NT. Reliabilty..something my body needs anyways...I like that. =)
I want to see a comparison of NT, Linux, and BSD.
But wait...This could make an excellent game of Rock,Paper,Scissors!!!! microsoft is better than sun(from M$ FUD). BSD runs hotmail. And linux beats M$. But to make it a good game...we'd have to agree on something that actually beats M$.
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
Im by no means a fan of Macintosh, But the reason they lost the OS/machine war is the same reason they have the ability for a great product.
You can't go on any test like this since both sides could argue about the HW being used. Maybe they didnt have good drivers for this or that piece of HW.
But..Apple has complete control over both the HW and the SW.
Not that they have made the best progress with that idea, but imagine if Linux or BSD made its own HW. It would really be something AMAZING!
So my comment to make this not be an -1 offtopic is that these tests should be conducted by perhaps a means of mutually agreed upon HW. Or better put... They should use HW that is well supported by both systems as well as NEW HW. These were old pentiums...
EVEN BETTER IDEA...do the same tests on a SPARC...wait...MS can't figure out SPARC.... -FIN
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
Adding up 52 of these would certainly add a little more downtime.
Ignore Alien Orders
At one place I deal with, it used to be that they had about oh 6-8 operators for many dozen Solaris boxes (I'm tempted to say hundreds, but it might be 150). As soon as they began suppling Win9X/NT support, the number of operators has increased, but the amount of operator time for UNIX support has decreased dramatically. Before you could put in requests for things to be installed onto the system. You can still do that but the time scale of upgrades has gone from a few weeks to several months, and in a few cases measuring into years.
Meanwhile, more and more time is spent keeping the NT boxes working. Mind you, the situation wasn't great before, but now I've just given up any hope of ever seeing additions made to software support.
Now, another place I work is having problems with NT, Macs, Linux and Solaris machines, but that can be traced to a huge lack of admin support (they have no full-time admins and have computers scattered all over a metropolis!). So it is possible to have Linux perform as poorly as NT, but you have to really work at it! :-)
Least you forget, this was a "year-long" study, hence the hardware used is going to be at least one year old. Since they probably did not pick bleeding-edge hardware a year ago either, it's safe to assume they used at least the prior year's hardware. So at the conclusion of the study, the hardware would be at best, two years old. Just speculation but it makes sense.
.agrippa.
It's very funny (and nice in the same time) to see an article that actually contradicts the M$ one.
It's a shame that we couldn't see all the results of the test, but since it's copyrighted and it's not for free I guess I can live only with what I saw. Anyway, guys, if you're interested look on the bloor-research site (this article costs some 81$ - kind of expensive for me).
There are 2 major parts of the article
: 1. Linux had the biggest growth on '99. And as far as I am concerned I see things only acclerating in the year to come. However, do not neglect that M$ has the best propaganda machine in the software industry, and that the Win 2k comes right on time. They may even bury NT4 and '98 only for commercial purposes (although I don't think they are that smart). And it comes right on time for presenting a "new" face of the company (with another CEO, prehaps bit shaken by some "anti-innovative" government employees etc). Their only cutback : price. Remember DOS was so popular not because it was good, but because it was so damn' cheap. Win 2k is not. Switching from NT4 to 2k costs a lot and I am not sure how many will be willing to do so just because MS says they should. Furthermore, this year I expect companies to sit and look - not buying either one of the OS's - at the struggle. And this is where Linux can enlarge the break it has made in '99. 2. Appilcations : while his statement is somewhat true, nothing is built overnight. Remember the applications available no longer than 18 months ago ? You'll see my point then.
How many machines did they test this on? Also, they said old Pentiums were used. Would comparing the two operating systems on such old machines be a fair comparison? If indeed they only tested one machine per operating system, then it simply sounds like a matter of NT being put on a lemon of a machine. How can we blame an OS for the hardware faults it goes through? I love Linux, I just found that this article left a lot of unanswered questions.
I know that Linux reliability can make the average Linux administrator feel like the Maytag repairman, so find yourself a Pentium-90 or equivalent gathering dust somewhere, install your favorite distro on it, and beat it to death. When you get bored with that, install another distro which you haven't used before and repeat. Install everything that you can find, and play, play, play. Find old hardware or borrow new hardware, install it and observe the results. Take lots of notes. Six months from now you might not remember how you resolved some tricky problem, but your notes will remember. Don't let the uptime on the crash test dummy exceed one week. Download new versions of the kernel and recompile often. Enjoy.
So, does anyone know of any studies out there that have compared Linux to Solaris. It would be quite funny to find that Solaris is more stable than Linux, thereby creating a logical impossibility, if you believe the previous article comparing NT/2000 to Solaris.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
I think this is prety much what most people would expect from WinNT 4. It doesnt have a chance against Linux - any distribution.
Windows 2000, however, is quite a different story. I'd be very interested to see a similar test performed between Windows 2000 and maybe Debian.
signature smigmature
- James
And yet there are books iMacs for Dummies and American Online for Dummies and the such. So sad.
Windows servers are more feature packed, but more unstable, where it is the opposite for linux. So when it's actualy running properly and not crashing, winHoes is better. But for what our school needs, and what I need, they should be using linux. sigh. My school board is just afraid to try something new.
My teacher would LOVE to put linux as at least the server, but the board techs would have none of it. Apparently it violates some agreement they have with Microsoft. SIGH SIGH SIGH!!
America Online for Dummies
What do you mean, a book?
Isn't that the thing they keep giving out 540 hours of on CD?
--
Talon Karrde
everybody likes it when Linux comes out on top. When Windows wins one of these dumb comparisons, Microsoft has paid someone off. Everyone here knows that NT is less stable than Linux, but I don't believe any one of these "studies". Everyone has an axe to grind. There lies, damn lies, and benchmarks.
Okay, I'd like to say one thing and make it very clear. I am a very avid user of Linux and use it for anything and everything I do related to computers. The one thing I am getting very tired of hearing lately is all this "Windows is better than Linux" or "Linux is better than Windows" garbage. I mean, come on, its not a black and white world where they are evil and we are good. Each has its own flaws in different areas (some more than others ;) but most (note how I say most) of these articles do not go into great detail explaining exactly which areas the operating systems accel or simply suck at. As long as we (Linux community) fire ammunition at Microsoft, they're going to keep firing ammunition back, and they're backed by a lot more money and resources than we are. What I'm saying is that we should just ignore this Microsoft FUD and put an end to this childish "I'm better than you! No you're not, I am!" gibberish.
(This is slightly off topic but I felt thats its gotta be said).
If NT using so called "advanced features" makes the server crash then it isn't so advanced is it? Maybe NT should disable unstable drivers like the Linux kernel does.
The hardware that was used was a couple of year old mid range boxes which most companies use as servers. Linux and NT were supported equally well on both boxes. This isn't bleeding edge by any streach of the imagination. If the NT drivers aren't stable after 2 years then they will never be stable.
This is simply proof that Windows NT crashes all the time like most people on slashdot says it does.
If you noticed, Linux only crashed once because of a hardware issue. Linux had exactly zero crashes due to the OS or the software running on the box. Linux the OS is as stable as your hardware. You can't get better than that.
Windows was down 65 hours, Linux was down 4 hours during the entire year of testing. According to the _report_ Linux is over 16 times more reliable than NT.
Quite frankly, my boss doesn't want to hear excuses as to _why_ a server is down, he doesn't want it to go down in the first place. With Linux I am 16 times closer to the goal than with NT. With Linux I can even fix the down time of the hard drive problem by adding a RAID system that would have dropped the down time to less than an hour. And if I put in hot swapable RAID maybe the server would have stayed up all year.
With Windows you have odd problems all the time that you can't fix because you don't know what caused them and since they only ever happen once there is nothing you can do but suffer through them over 30 times a year, hoping that one of the crashes doesn't damage the boxes file system beyond recovery.
I have shown you a report with hard facts, show me a report for as long a time that proves otherwise. And don't give me any anecdotal evidence, I want hard numbers.
-- Never make a general statement.
I don't use Linux myself but I have heard about how stable it is and I'm wondering why it's not more commonly used in homes. I see plenty of commercials for microsoft and all those others boasting of great servers and web hosting and even for "standard home computers". With such a great OS as Linux appears to be I'd be one of the many to jump up and scream FINALLY!! if Linux ever had a commercial for itself. Plus just the fact that Tux is so cute would send hordes of users to their local stores to buy a computer with Linux on it. One last comment...if everybody else is using commercial ways to suck more users blindly into their endless abyss, why shouldn't Linux be allowed to run in the rat race?
Cheers
AlphaReality
http://www.alphareality.cjb.net
I wonder How reliable each of the OS's are if you remove the hardware failures? The true test of an operating system's reliability is how long it runs, discounting all hardware failures which have not been nor could be caused by the OS. As much as I disdain Microsoft products as being more bells and whistles than guts, many shops are using it, not only for the additional apps, but due to reliability, that they experience themselves. I wonder if a solid test can be performed and the results be truly measured unbisedly? I just dont feel that windows would win, but I would like to be able to pass on to the multitude of customers we have real and unbiased application and OS data. Not be at the mercy of hardware failure which are unpredictable at best.
From the country where life is "TRUE BLUE" and tech support reigns..
I note that 68 crashes / 65 hours = about 0.96 hours per reboot.
Anyone want to bet that the Blight of Redmond will use these findings to benchmark a claim that Linux (one crash, 4 hours) reboots four times more slowly than their esteemed product?
--
Sysadmin? I don't think they deserve that title if they're not smart enough to clear out inetd.conf
---
# iptables -A INPUT -s 0/0 -j DROP
*shrug*
My last customer was using Exchange Servers (2) for a total of 1000 users (email mainly). No down time in 4 months...
;-)   What kind of hardware were they using?
No flame here...   just informational question...  
Thanks!
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
Micros~1 says WinNT is more reliable than either Linux or Solaris. Bloor says Linux is more reliable than WinNT. My own experience tells me that Linux and Solaris are comparable in reliability.
I think someone needs to call Micros~1's bank and make sure they have enough funds to cover their reality check before it bounces...
"I am definitely feeling some aggressive tendencies, Captain!" ---Worf, 'Star Trek - Insurrection'
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
Why the heck is this article flamebait? I would hav egiven it a +1 Insightful. This kind of moderation is worse than none.
In my personal experience Linux seems far more stable than Windows. I really appreciate the ability Linux has to upgrade or add software without needing to reboot. The one exception might be Kernel rebuilding. Open source is a strong point as well. However, if the hardware is common and of good quality, and the added applications are also of good quality and repute, then Windows runs fine. Windows doesn't like sudden changes, which Linux takes in stride. Linux right out of the box has more networking capablitity than Windows 95/95/2000, and is on par with NT. It should be remembered that Linux was not intended to be an operating system for the computer illiterate, which Windows *is* intended for. If you can't deal with command line syntax you loose better than half of Linux's capablities. Windows tends toward hiding command line capabilities, keeping users in the dark about the "behind the scenes." A GUI is just that, a front door to a house with pretty trim. Open the door and you see how the GUI interacts with the base software at the command line level. Walk into the basement and watch the software interact with the hardware. Anything that can be done from a GUI can be done at a command prompt, if you know how. The GUI is merely a way for those new to the system to get right in and work. (remember the topic about Apple's Lisa GUI?) Bottom line: If you don't like heavily commercialized products, and have more than two brain cells to rub together for warmth, you won't like Windows. Something to keep in mind is that Windows *requires* applications, third party or otherwise, to be useful. Linux does not. You can get Linux apps, but you can also make your own. Can't do that with Windows.
I DARE YOU TO MODERATE THIS DOWN, FUCKA!
---
"Have some dignity" --Mickey Knox
I used Linux AND NT AND VMS AND AIX AND Solaris. My last customer was using Exchange Servers (2) for a total of 1000 users (email mainly). No down time in 4 months...Backup end of the week with ADSM, everything worked like a charm. They are using Linux for print and file server and Samba for a flawless service (on my advice) to provide this service to other platform (RS/6000 and Solaris). NT is very simple to run. A good maintenance is critical. I am using Linux at home because my NT box is crashing every 4 hours or so....