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Linux At The BBC [updated]
KobyBoy writes "Damion Yates wrote a very nice and informative article about how the BBC is using Linux. Linux is quite widespread in their in-house server environment, their development environment and of course in their production environment. He even mentions the excellent support Donald Becker (from Linux NIC card support fame) has provided him." Update: 09/24 21:54 GMT by T : Whoops -- this article is pretty old. Make that, the BBC is still using Linux.
How are the IT departments handling changes in big corporatinos like BBC? Do they have to hire new admins or keep there old ones? Going from NT to Linux would require new people, wouldn't it?
Maybe you could ask the BBC to `aspell' your post.
...but not all that important. Why not focus on the continuous improvement of Linux and the advancement of Open Source. If we strive for those two things, take all criticism ina constructive manner, there will be no need to worry about other OS's and other systems that we already know aren't up to par.
I am Lord Snowbeam. Heed my call!
Droool... I love visiting, first thing I hit is a FishNChip shop for grub... yum. Although the thought of a Fried Tux sounds both Yummy and sad at the same time.
I work with Damion Yates, who wrote this article almost 3 years ago now. Guess it's time for an update...
Imagine a beowulf cluster of this guy.
what the hell is a nic card?
If you take a look at the BBC network you'll get an idea (Actually, you'll get cold, hard figures) of the amount of data the BBC chucks around daily. Done with Open Source. Just remember it, next time someone tries to tell you Linux doesn't scale!
Why not focus on the continuous improvement of Linux and the advancement of Open Source
:)
And the way to improve and advance Linux and Open Source is to testify and evangelize. Notice I didn't write "fanaticize."
What's good about this is article is that it demonstrates that Linux is a viable and useful platform in a very demanding environment that's based entirely around things like deadlines, schedules, communications and connectivity. If things aren't reliable and the news is slow to be gathered or released, you're dead in the water. The BBC is also a very recognized and respectable name, the fact they're using Linux carries more weight than Joe Blow's Pizza Shack.
There's also the added plus of businesses seeking to deploy Linux being able to communicate with companies that have rolled it out in practice, not in theory. They can glean information on pitfalls and tactics to make the best decision possible and avoid mistakes made by others in the past.
the hell?
Would that be a NIC card like an ATM Machine, or Windows 2000 being built on NT Technology?
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
This would be relevant except for that fact that the article is ancient and the BBC have moved on since then. The BBC has moved its focus on Linux and it is now targetted towards OGG and back end services. There are a few front end machines but these are being moved to Solaris to be inline with the rest of the service. There are a few announcments to make regarding linux within the BBC, but I am sure these will be slashdotted in the near future and will be more relevant than this article and it's author.
grumble grumble...
... hi bingo
Its like a PIN Number!
Speaking of the BBC, one thing many US citizens don't know about is that they offer ad-free, free news through http://news.bbc.co.uk - no, it's not US-centric like most US news sources, but it gives a nice perspective on lots of global issues, stuff you might not even hear about in US news. (And if you really, really still want just US news, click the "Americas" link.) What does this have to do with running Linux? Well, not much, I just thought that this was useful information.
To 'nick' something is a slang term for stealing it. I think that's why the RIAA are so scared of networks.
Serious Question not trying to flame
....
In the past 3 years I have really taking a liking to Unix(mainly Linux and FreeBSD). Now my understanding is that FreeBSD is a better server platform(or at least it once was) than Linux.
My question: Why would the BBC use Linux over FreeBSD for their servers?
Possible answers:
1. Linux has hype
2. Unix folks like using Linux as a desktop so it's a natural upgrade(Much like MS with NT)
3. FreeBSD it hard to use?
4
I am in no way trying to bash Linux or FreeBSD(I use Linux at work, FreeBSD at home) just curious.
Please tell me don't flame saying one is better than the other unless it supports your argument about why Linux is being used more(or seems to be).
That part about mailing the maker of the device driver is interesting and great. But the problem that I have is that if the driver creator did not want to answer his email, he would not have to. He has no responsibility to the drivers that he creates. A company on the other hand does (in theory) and should be forced to respond to such inquiries. There is an implied responsibility they must address.
Nevertheless, it is nice to know that if the author didn't write back you could always dig through the code.
We pay for it through the TV licence (A bit of a misnomer these days, as it pays for BBC Radio, BBCi, BBC News and what is now 4 BBC channels, 6 if you count BBC News24 and BBC Parliament)
Still, I personally think that the TV licence is fucking great value for money.
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree, but what the hell. I'm watching Ab Fab, and I love the BBC. Go watch Sky.
If only you could get CEO or CIO magazine to link to that article.
Unfortunately, few if any CEOs or CIOs will ever read the article. Having this article on Linux Planet and Slashdot is simply preaching to the chior. Again!
Rave reviews, none the less.
and that R&D dept won't stand for much longer. They've been assimilated into another company the BBC bought, which is pretty much exclusively windows. All the geeks are taking their sandals and running.
All us jobless M$ admins out in silicon valley?
/. readers will get the point and follow suit.
Fuck M$, after 7 years of supporting thier crappy O/S, fighting with the developers to use exchange instead of a popmail solution, after 7 years of fighting with the linux zealots on the merits of a M$ based system, i'm burnt out. This Sp1 stuff is complete crap.
There's a lot more of me's out there than you think microsoft.
From now on, instead of teaching people how to use outlook express i'll be teaching them how to use kmail, instead of IE i wil be showing them gecko, instead of teaching them how to use word i'll show them how to use open office.
It wont just stop there either, i'll load their pc's up with emulators and roms galore, show their kids how to play games on something other than windows. I'll install quake and UT2003 for those that buy it.
Microsft really fucked up by cutting out the people that for years was the undermining support for preaching their products. I no longer wish to be a microsoft whore. I remember several times having to frantically dig out NT40 CAL's just to be sure we had enough licenses so someone could save a file on a server. What utter nonsense and I was a nincompoop for doing it.
You pissed off one little jobless NT admin M$, and i'm sure there is many more. Granted this comment doesn't get modded into oblivion, perhaps the other
Your days are numbered bill.
They were invaluable to me, worked better than anything else. It must have been a successful trial.
So why aren't they up permanently? Why can't I listen to my favourite DJs every weekend on the essential mix?
Liberty.
Carrie Fisher is a cure for priapasm.
...will there be a new distro out? I can just see it now: BeebLinux: The Penguin with dry humor. Error messages: "Your bloody network isn't running, blokie. Besides, it's 4pm, time for tea and crumpets. BeebLinux has just paged the help for you, your tea will arrive shortly, love."
The mascot. A female Tux with a crown, maybe? Or just pasting Tony Blair's face on Tux. Opening screen: The House of Lords filled to the brim with Penguins in powdered wigs...
Remove the zealotry and what do you get???
Stunning silence!
In America, "tuna" usually refers to the non-canned variety, as in tuna steak or tuna sushi. "Tunafish" is stuff that comes in a can, for preparation with mayonnaise in "tunafish salad."
The news stories may have been based on fact, but the editorialization of the stories made it look very bad. Not the place to look for an objective treatement of news stories. A lot of biased titles and carefully choosen emphasised comments.
Ok, I happen to agree with some of the opinions presented, but it's not the point. Journalism is supposed to be OBJECTIVE.
On a side note, I'm still looking for a sort-of-unbiased news website. Maybe with the google new NEWS tab...
However difficulty is to have errorless communication, or bufferable communication with channels to allow for burstable data so that caches can be repopulated, if they are got depleted due to some errors.having like 30seconds of cache is good idea, esp. when seconds of broadcast time cost thousands of dollars/pounds. ... for one thing I think emergency channels should stay ;-)
Same way that analog phones are great... and technology too, you might loose signal, but not a call. If you have too many errors on digital stream, call is dropped. What happens if there is some sort of ionization in atmosphere?
analog and use vacuum tube electronics.
If we had uncompressed digital, it would be just as good as analog, however it is too expensive(not dollar). Error correction in MPEG streams is rather bad... great thing that they use linux, but not all that linux is good! Its how you apply it. Vacuum tubes used for communication in stormy weather via AM channels. no static. and tubes are as stable as hell.. or heaven!
2c,
p.
I've been looking for that list ever since that South Park episode, but couldn't find it.
Thanks again slashdot!
I've become very disappointed with BBC News Online. BBC Radio and Television news used to be the best in the world, and was nearly always unbiased. Their website just doesn't live up to that legacy, though.
you MUST mean strawberry
That was classic intercourse!
Would you rather have your news from independent organizations or from an official government mouthpiece? The BBC is a state-run organization and is controlled and owned by the British government.
Some things the BBC is better at than CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc.:
- Greater international coverage
- Less fluff and "human interest" stories. More real news.
The BBC does a great job of showing a semblance of unbiasedness. It actually criticizes the British government sometimes. What's particularly dangerous, however, is all the bias that's hidden in the reporting veiled by that pretense of unbiasedness. For example, the BBC finds it almost impossible to do a story about a third-world former British colony without pointing out exactly how the cretins are unable to govern themselves (the implication being that they would have been better off under British rule).
If you read any of the cricket coverage on the BBC, the stories have a particular slant including "journalism" that's nothing but slander accusing every other country and umpire of cheating.
Those are just examples. You see the same thing all through their coverage. They are anything but unbiased and objective. They do a great job of spreading propoganda to people who know nothing about the actual issue, however. So if you knew nothing about the actual situation in Zimbabwe, the BBC would do a great job of projecting the British viewpoint on your subject and you'll make the mistake of believing it is objective and unbiased.
\end{mindless_rant}
Mmmm.. Donuts
Has anybody ported Linux to the Beeb Microcomputer?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why not FreeBSD?
We do realmedia encoding with linux, realnetworks don't provide a *BSD binary to the best of my knowledged. The dtext boxes simply needed to be reliable, not massively scalable servers. One possible project will need vmware which is also linux only. We have Free/Open and NetBSD fans in Internet Services, but we're all capable UNIX admins so we're running secure reliable systems on Solaris and Linux, there is nothing to gain from using FreeBSD for example. Personally I like playing q3a so my desision is obvious at home.
The Ogg Vorbis streams should restart shortly, we've had permission to go for it now! We might even get real links from the same JS popups that the 'real' links are on. We've had some space problems... We have to provide realmedia encoding for loads of parts of the bbc, there is a massive quantity of scheduled encoding events. The number of spare realmedia encoding servers was limited, as was audio matrix outputs and rackspace. We were able to set up ogg on a few when we had spare boxes, once we were streaming live Ciaran contacted monty who worked on making it closer to comparible to real, which quite frankly was far superior at lower/modem bitrates. Ogg was rivaling mp3 at 96/128kbps not wm/real at less than that. We also spent months convincing internal red tape using peeps to let us advertise this slightly! Eventually Ogg at the bbc was available, but only to l33t /. kiddies (preaching to the c..), it didn't
really get discovered by enough average joes of the public. We also needed
to nick back some encoders for real streams we'd promised the internal BBC
people. The AOD (audio on demand) project needs loads of encoders, the
embeded player popup crashes NS4 with embeded Linux or Solaris realplay.
[Please help out by complaining to the site owners so it's not just us
doing do! - but not postmaster/support/noc etc, that is us]. We're working
on coding a Solaris and/or Linux kernel module or LD_PRELOADable bit of
code to allow multiple processes to open the audio device and be none the
wiser, this will mean we won't need as many boxes for live 24x7 streams
along side recoded on-demand streams. [help us out] Then we'll have ogg
back in a jiffy! Alternatively you can wait for our move to complete* and
we should have extra encoding capacity. Next task [when asked to provide
feedback about ogg streaming, emails that say "Real is shit it makes popups
and adverts in my desktop waa waa waa.." REALLY don't help Ogg. Many in
the BBC believe it's Windows VS Real, Real can encode on many platforms, be
served reliably on many platforms and be received on many platforms.
Windows Media can only be encoded on Windows and there are limited
platforms that can play it. We're fighting for Ogg, but if your Realmedia
moans get us converted to WMT then the team that are fighting for you will
have quit. Real aren't evil, they are even now supporting Ogg! Real works
on the 9210i, I've checked our scottish footballs streams on one while
ssh'ed to the encoder it was started on!].
*http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/25730.html
Well as of 9am 23rd of Sept nearly 40% of what was BBC I.S. of Ogg fame,
started work at the new location, we've suffered a lot, but the new
building is bigger and probably will work out well, if not least due to much
more rackspace for ogg encoders.
New distro? Well the followup article would cover that, there kinda is a BBC specific dist, it would be dry humoUr of course. It's more the build mechanism. Tim Hurmans work on serial net boot and PXE, a shrunk version of slacks color.gz (should be coloUr!)
You want to open the audio device multiple times ? Is that for mixing ? If so, you can run esd and use esddsp to have the sound that would have been sent to /dev/dsp sent to esd instead. It works with 99% of audio apps that are written for OSS output.
If this isn't what you want, please try explaining further and I'm sure someone will help out (me if I can.)
Rik
Sigh, I wish somone would have clued BBC in to the FreeBSD operating system. Now it will be much harder for them to correct their mistake. I hope they don't lose any data from ext2fs or suffer vm instability and get soured from free software totally, because all they have to do is switch to FreeBSD.
My IT manager, the head software developer, and the manager of our business applications group scratches their head when they hear "line-ucks?" Ahh, corporate America.
I think they want to encode multiple streams on the same box from one audio source/device. I could be wrong of course.
According to NTK, the BBC has merged its streaming media divisions so a move to OGG may no longer be on the cards.
I can imagine all the BBC viewers thinking "so why are we paying for what we can get for free?".
ffmpeg/ffserver does this for audio and video, no ogg support yet afaik.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
What we need now is a campaign to get the Beeb to drop its use of Real as the preferred format for audio & video, in favour of, say, MP3 and MPEG.
I cannot abide the scumsucking Real player - not least since it appears wantonly to steal file associations (okay, in Windoze) each time it is used, appearing to ignore any preference settings which suggest the me (the mere user) would prefer to keep my MP3 association with, say, Winamp.
Not from me though.
Personally, I wonder how long someone like yourself can last using such things as MS. As a software engineer who used windows 3.1 borland c++ for a month in 1991, and solaris ever since, I really do wonder how different it would be to be on the other side of the coin. A different OS every few years... Supporting how many flavours of an OS as an admin?
But however, theres the common MS belief/PR that managing a PC is easy with windows. It all networks itself. This might be true (in a sense) for a single user case (which I think is MS's strength), but 10 times worse for 10 users and exponetially worse as it grows.
So you end up with a difficult job that everyone thinks is easy.. I mean, thats why they bought MS in the first place, right?
My personal view is that MS does not have the higher level technical ability to survive in an open market. Thus they will continue to manipulate and buy and sell souls like they've always done (I remember DR Dos). People like yourself?
Well, its only really a matter of time before you find that out...
I was very interested indeed to read some of the comments regarding the use of Ogg at the BBC.
This is most certainly the first I have learned of the trials you guys are conducting, and I thought I was well informed!
The BBC is rare in providing streaming formats that can be played on most platforms since RealPlayer is available for practically anything.
Out of curiousity, what licencing issues are relvent to WMA, Real and Ogg and how efficient (in terms of computing ommph) are the various encoders?
From my perspective the BBC is in a very strong position to introduce the world to open formats such as Ogg, particularly if they are able to provide the players for different platforms as downloads from the BBC site, which may be possible with some of the licences attached to Ogg players.
I wish you guys every success and will keep my eyes peeled on your front page.
-ed
Be nice to people on the way up. You will meet them again on your way down!
The message which should be taken away form this is: The BBC is absolutely dependent on standards, and hence uses Free Software to ensure compliance.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
...and sort Oldest first. Then sit back, read, and enjoy!
Beowulf funny. Business plan not.
I know where you live, 198.65.34.28, just you wait.
plz plz plz just stop these business plan comments. I prefer the goatse ones now.
Fifty ninth post. Or something. Just look at the other "fp"s and do what they tell you to. Which is no doubt something incredibly disgusting.
Here's the evidence.
The BBC also provide some the best Science and Technology coverage found in *any* mainstream media.
Including this interesting pience on why News beats porn online.
Agence France Presse http://www.afp.com/english/home/
Realproducer wants to talk to /dev/dsp we can't make it use esd, though it's
/dev/something and receive audio on it would be VERY useful.
worth noting that the realnetwork techies did add esd support to realplay. Yes
we want to run several encode processes on one box. Cheap PCs are using 5% of
cpu to do encoding so the capacity is there. We have video capture on the spare
pci slot (these are 1U boxes) though we've thought about making some of the
boxes audio only so they have two cards as a solution. This would work, but is
a pain, it means splitting the audio and also limits us to only two encodes on
the box*. A more generic shared audio access would be much better. Some of the
vid-capture cards we've used (Osprey I believe) also had audio inputs with no
linux support. One of my colleagues developed an audio driver for this which
did work to some extent but same limitation as above, but it needed some work
and was limited in the sample rates it could set the audio capture at (I believe
this is more fully supported in 2.4 and 2.5 now). We've also got hold of the
SDK from real which in theory should make it possible to write our own encoder
but we lack time at the moment. Making solaris/linux allow as many apps to open
*we stream a great many stations live 24x7 and want to make many programmes available
on demand. Sometimes a programme description might be for a 3 hour show, but another
smaller show wants a 30 minute snippit from that, so we'd need 3 simultanious encodes
at that point. A more common problem is that realproducer takes a few minutes to finish
writing to disk once it's finished streaming, it holds the audio device during that time so
nose->tail encodes don't fit.
Oh... I though cold grits worked best, but good point... I'll try some of her too.
Juln
DOS Air:
All the passengers go out onto the runway, grab hold of the plane, push it
until it gets in the air, hop on, jump off when it hits the ground again.
Then they grab the plane again, push it back into the air, hop on, et
cetera.
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