Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Moving To FreeBSD
CmdrTaco seems to be excited about the move, knowing there are several BSD experts on the network staff now.
"Linux's disorganization, and the fact it seems like a a bunch of unconnected developers tried to write an OS with no prior planning or agreements has been hard for us at Slashdot who have to work with the Operating System. To the users, there will be no difference, the upgrade will be seamless. Trish and Jim will be happy and they will stop their complaining about Linux," he said.
John Baldwin, a kernel hacker working on SMPng at BSDI's Open Source Division, said that "it should be able to handle Slashdot just fine, Are we done yet? I have things to code."
This also reflects a shift in focus for OSDN, as we are starting to move away from the politically charged Linux in favor of more reasonable, stable OSes.
You're sure to hear more about this transition in the coming weeks, along with some other important announcements.
since then SGI have booted linux on a 64 node Origin2000.
--paulj
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
No, if they were going to move to a real OS, they'd be moving to OpenBSD. Alas, though, SMB in Open is, well, not there ;)
Seriously, though, I'd trust BSD code a hell of a lot more than Linux. Rumor has it that RedHat won't even compile from source anymore. They have to rebuild each rpm individually and what-not.
BSD rules.
Couldn't imagine why people dont use *BSD for application servers more. Oh yeah, the lack of actual vendor support. You cant even get a half-decent JVM for the thing.
:)
Generaly, I've only had to use BSD in some situations where i needed a pretty robust networking setup with a small base supporting system of programs. I don't mind it being used because of its time tested firewalling (compared to netfilter, which really does kick a bit of ass, but is brand-spanking-new but who cares otherwise?
Also, nothing stops a few hundred megabit smurfs. You can protect the load on your heavenly precious applications servers, but the poor, poor upstream and firewall taht have to deal with it. Too bad theres no good traceback yet on ICMP to deal with this. Yes, traceback on ICMP. Be afraid, you too might lose your privacy to ping.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
We actually had a customer once who had their 10baseT fiber media convertor plugged into a lamp timer. At 5pm, internet access was cut off and the office had to go home. At 7am, internet access was back on and people could come to work.
hilarious.
Joseph W. Breu
1) /. is coded in mod_perl, with precompilation of scripts and all, so it's not all that inefficient. /. is opensource (see slashcode.com, and has quite a following. I'm sure it's been tested on many OSs beyond Linux and FreeBSD.
2) Apache/mod_perl code is very portable between Unix systems; unless you go out of your way to use odd non-portable things like syscall(), the odds are that your Linux code will run on FreeBSD without a single change
3) the source code of
This not funny. FreeBSD makes good business sense. *I FLAME RED HAT AND CURSE COMMERCIAL LINUX OFFERINGS*
one is good. two is OK. A day of mediocre april fool's jokes is NOT OK.
I, for one, was really depressed by the lackluster April 1 RFC this year. I much prefer IP over Avian Carriers.
*sigh*
In the new millennium, there will be no good humor...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
COM and DCOM? Unix has had pluggable components that worked well with each other for more than twenty years.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
You get 3 days to moderate. If you don't see anything you like today, wait until tomorrow.
Reality has a liberal bias
Wellington, New Zealand. It's been April 2nd here for twenty fucking hours. Enough. Choose one, make it good, don't do this next year - it blows.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
I'd just like to say that this has been the most stupid, pointless, unfunny april fool's day in the history of mankind, or perhaps just slashdot. If you're going to do a joke, at least either invest an oddly large amount of time in the project (bonsai kitten) or make it very funny. There is a reason sites like nytimes and cnn.com don't do these stupid things, and that is because they are reputable news sites whose job it is to inform their readership. Slashdot, while not terribly reputable ("post first, fact-check later!"), still claims to be a news site. I think a certain level of maturity is called for at some point.
And if you're going to make jokes, make them funny, at least!
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
.300 Winchester Magnum reaches farther, flatter than 7.62 NATO, though it does kick. I once put my left shoulder against a tree and fired - my back was sore for a week!
.50 MacMillan single-shot is state of the art when you want to "reach out and touch someone." The .50 has range out to a mile, if you're really good, or lucky.
The
Oh, he asked about Operating Systems? Never mind.
The White House has had tens of thousands of angry "Slashdotters" started to protest in DC, while 500 police and National Guard officers patroled the area. Angry comments to the police such as "You won't understand what Slashdot meant to me!" and "L33T HAXORS OWNZ J00!" were exchanged, resulting in a fiery clash that left hundreds dead. The remaining crowd set fires, destroyed property, and put all the W's back on the keyboards in the White House. Mysteriously, about 50 pairs of pants with what appears to be hot grits in them were left behind.
Even Natalie Portman tried to appease the crowd by unveiling a carved petrified-wood model of herself.
Riots in Redmond, Washington have also broken out, as thousands of pro-Microsofter's started tailgate parties and drunken orgies in the Microsoft parking lot. Bill Gates was quoted as saying "I'm too old for this [sexual activity]."
The global economy has plummeted, the moon has decided to start moving back towards earth, and Linus Torvalds is traveling by armored plane to Rob Malda to propose a Linux unification standard. Whether it will work out remains to be seen.
But in all honesty, the best argument is a straightforward upgrade path. I tried to upgrade a RedHat box, and after the fourth RPM that needed another RPM or was missing files or didn't compile correctly, I wiped the disc, mounted a couple dirs, and installed a fresh, current system with a few commands. If upgrading is hard, people do it less. That's why boxes get hacked, often.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
How the post looks in Sydney, Australia (GMT10+).
Gotta hate it when your April Fools joke bites you due to differences in time zones....
this was posted on April 2, (the Slashot clock wasn't set for daylight savings) but it can't be true.
Heh! This is probably an April Fools' day joke, which tells us all how clueless the Slashdot crew really is. To them, it's a joke that will never be true. To many of us, it's quite possible and it would be quite rational to move to FreeBSD for a high-load network service (i.e. website). Go figure!
Good try, anyway!
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
God forbid they actually use something better suited to the job! I don't know if FreeBSD 5.0 is that product, but it is stupid to use an inferior product (not that Linux is that product!) just because you have groundless attraction to it.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'm gonna go cybersquat on vabsd.com right now.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Doing mod_perl, I can't imagine that one would be using material that's non portable. The caveat is C-compiled extensions, such as DBD::Mysql. I believe the windows client is freely available, but it might not be trivial to get everything going.
As for coding to "/tmp", what's wrong with making a temp-directory? I thought the slashes were adaptable in perl.
Not saying there might not be problems - Hell the CPAN module issue became a nightmare when we moved from Linux to Solaris - but most pure perl code should be inherently portable. Even the UNIX fork now works in windows (thanks to interpreter multi-threading).
-Michael
-Michael
See Java run
See Java run fast
See Java run fast on Mac OS X.
Mad props to Apple Inc. for that one.
While I am sure the flamebait is a comin', I must remark that I think Slashdot is being rather foolish. Nothing against FreeBSD 5.0. It is a great OS and may it live long and prosper. However, to move based on FreeBSD 5.0's SMP support is extremely stupid. First of all, FreeBSD 5.0's SMP support is at best par with Linux 2.4. The argument that Linux is splintering is even more stupid. All of my linux news pretty much comes from Slashdot links, and everything posted in the past few months clearly points to Linux becoming more centralized! Look at the Linux 2.5 debate! However, FreeBSD is a great OS, no question about it. But, I doubt that Slashdot will accomplish anything other than some extra IT expenses by moving to FreeBSD.
Someone you trust is one of us.
I have been told first hand by some people who work at VA that supporting BSD is something that they've been looking in to and have done a little of in the past.
/. switching is all that far-fetched. If it is a April Fools...Kudos to the editors for putting together a rather plausible goof.
So I don't think that the possibility of
For anyone that will go to the grave exclaiming that Linux rules and *BSD sucks, look at the cold hard facts - ftp.cdrom.com/ftp.freesoftware.com's and OpenBSD's track records. I work on Linux and use FreeBSD at home because I prefer it. Maybe the BSDs are not as "bleeding-edge" but they work, plain and simple. No fragmented distributions and code-bases, just cohesive functiong product.
Just for your further edification, FreeBSD's SMP support is on a level with Linux2.0's. That means it has one giant kernel lock, and is really only useful up to 2 processors (and really not even then). Whereas Linux has had alot of tuning in this area, it scales up to around 8 processors, and can do 12 or 16 if you're really masochistic. (SGI had it running on 32, but said nothing of efficiency).
For good FreeBSD SMP you're going to have to wait for 5.0.. But that probably wont be out until 2004.
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
--
From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews
I'm trying to put a line in my firewall script (iptables v1.1.2) which will reject packets based on source address and the date. Can anyone help? I think this would be useful for a lot of people.
:wq
If in doubt, nmap is your friend.
-----
I finally get to be a Moderator (supreme cosmic power at my fingertips!) and I get stuck moderating people's trolls on slashdot's april fools posts? Dah. Its a cruel cruel web.
Shall I get the flamewar kicking?
WHAT???? FREEBSD 5.0 SUCKS! Why not move to OS X for godsake?! If yer gonna dump Linux, move to something worthwhile.. hell, Windows ME running Personal Web Server would be a step up!
-gerbik
VABSD.com is taken.
Registrant:
ByteCode (VABSD-DOM)
1550 Sonnys Way
Hollister, CA 95023
US
Domain Name: VABSD.COM
Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
Brooks, Kevin (KB842) brooks@BYTECODE.COM
ByteCode
1789 Glenmorrie Dr.
Lake Oswego, OR 97034
US
(408) 565-9601
Technical Contact:
Operations Center, NetGate Network (NNO) noc@NETGATE.NET
NetGate Communications
473 Sapena Court, Suite 6
Santa Clara, CA 95054-2427
(408) 565-9601
Record last updated on 12-Mar-2000.
Record expires on 12-Mar-2002.
Record created on 12-Mar-2000.
Database last updated on 1-Apr-2001 15:09:00 EDT.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS.NETGATE.NET 204.145.147.12
NS2.NETGATE.NET 204.145.147.16
NS3.NETGATE.NET 205.214.170.254
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm really sure he loves you for posting his email address on a public archived site for all of the spam-bots to feast upon.
Except registering a domain itself will post your address on a public whois database for all the spam-bots to query.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So, now we have 2 april fool days? a whole week?
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
If it were "Slashdot moving to Windows/IIS", it might've been funny.
"Slashdot Moving To Windows 2000"
In a somewhat surprising move, Slashdot administrators have chosen to move their primary web hosting servers to the Windows 2000 platform. While the audience of Slashdot is primarily unix-based and Microsoft-hating, CmdrTaco believes the move is justified.
"You get what you pay for, so we're paying Microsoft a lot of money for our clustered servers. We like the fact that we can blame Microsoft when Slashdot gets overloaded with requests. In addition, Windows 2000 can run MySQL just as well as Linux. I also like to browse with Internet Explorer on the web server and click the pretty little widgets to mess with server hardware." he said.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
MS Windows 95 was giving me a free BSD about every nth slashdot post. I couldn't handle the Blue flashing and resorted to using Blue-Blocker sunglasses for awhile. I still couldn't block out the free BSD and so I moved to Linux and X11. Now I only see the Almighty God's free BSD outside my Window, a cloud drifting by, no protection errors in mother nature...
Then those "people", those stinking relatives arived and they were pissed because they couldn't do anything on my newly protected computer system. Ever since that transitional day, I put a tux sticker on every computer I owned... Life is good... when the relatives get their stepin'...
Socialists and Communists have nothing to fear,
without prejudice
I agree though, I find the SMP as well as the RAID support on the Palm to be rather lacking, but I'll be happy to send you my modified kernel for it if you wanna give that a shot.
Teaching your girlfriend to play "Palm Pilot" >>> The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
In reaction to this announcement, Mr. Stallman screamed in anger. "This sort-of-closed-source BSD licensing scheme is inappropriate and unacceptable, and furthermore, the press release clearly says 'Linux,' not 'GNU/Linux.' I want Taco's head on a plate with a side of refried beans, now!!"
--
--hongpong.com
10:02PM OK, thats it the slashcode is now running on an eight way CMP machine under FreeBSD
10:23PM Started the synchronization process to sync the new system's disks to the old, this will take a while time for the copy to complete, time for dunkin doughnuts
11:13PM Got paged on the RIM halfway through a double chocholate Kruler, system problem. Left the doughnut shop so fast the assistant now thinks we are undercover cops.
11:45PM The console on the FreeBSD system is reading 'Kernel Panic', system is still up and running and the copy process is continuing
12:34PM Cmdr Taco just discovered that although the system is still running it now reports only six processors, what happened to the other two? Should we take the system down?
01:23AM This is wierd, according to the system console all eight processors are running, only two of them are now running OpenBSD.
02:30AM Two more processors have defected, one has joined the OpenBSD cluster, the other is running a variant called SafeBSD.
02:45AM Things are getting worse, the four renegade processors are demanding equal rights in the decision making process and an equal share of the X-Windows output server.
03:44AM Two more processors have defected, one from the FreeBSD camp to OpenBSD, this is partly compensated for by another processor leaving the OpenBSD camp and moving to an earlier FreeBSD release.
04:23AM Another defection, this time the CPU in question is demanding a byte-order change operation.
05:23AM Civil war has broken out. The rival O/S factions are placing locks on the various system resources
etc.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Microsoft has decided to move to Mac OS X, while Linus believes that Windows ME 0.3 is the future of all computing. In un-related news, Sun loves AMD and SGI is may as well be dog-humping SCO. Steve Jobs has jumped in bed with the new Amiga company, and HP-UX will now be called BeOS. Wall Street has collectively commited suicide, and the American public pretty much just yawned, except for the 145 day traders who strung themselves up by the privates.....
Newsweek says, "We like cheese"
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.