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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.
I work with Damion Yates, who wrote this article almost 3 years ago now. Guess it's time for an update...
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.
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.
> My question: Why would the BBC use Linux over FreeBSD for their servers?
My guesstimate (the article didn't say) would be support for their hardware. At this point, Linux has wider support than FreeBSD.
you not seen http://support.bbc.co.uk/ogg/ recently?
4. linux has a journaling filesystem, freebsd doesn't
5. linux has SMP (multiprocessor support), freebsd doesn't
Those are the big two reasons why I would use linux in a professional environment.
Wrong.
4. Soft updates, as someone else has mentioned.
5. Hello? SMP support has been in there for what, 4 years now?
Stop the FUD train, please. I want off.
I hope you wrote to the BBC to express your support for this effort, rather than just posting to Slashdot. I have it on some authority that your letters and emails on this subject are in fact read, and they are taken seriously.
It's not state-run in the same way as, say, the Chinese media as you appear to be implying. It's not controlled by the government in terms of day-to-day management. The application of editorial pressure by politicians is, if IIRC, illegal. Moreover, it's not owned by the government in the sense of a nationalised state utility. It is an independent "corporation" (hence the C in BBC) that manages its own affairs. It is subject to some restriction of its commercial activity, and some protection from the pressures of the commercial world that allow it to produce stuff that's percieved to be "public service". If anyone could be said to own it, it would be the license payer, and in a much more direct way than the taxpayer could be said to own a nationalised utility.
Maybe you knew all this but, taken with the rest of your comment, you seem to be implying that the BBC is little more than a mouthpiece of the "British viewpoint", whatever the fuck that is.
And we all know that moving to Channel 4 was the best thing to happen to English cricket since Ian Botham and 1981 ;->
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!)