Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the and-they-all-run-the-beast dept.
X86BSD writes "Interesting survey at Netcraft showing the most reliable hosting providers for June. Interesting that not just the top 5 are FreeBSD but that the top 10 come from all variants in the industry."
Before the *BSD is Dying trolls start...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Informative
According to Netcraft,
Intriguingly, all of the Top 5 placed sites run the FreeBSD operating system
I'm curious over the choice of the word "Intriguingly." My experience with FreeBSD has shown it to be nothing but rock-solid as a server OS. I actually prefer it over Linux these days (I was a RH-zealot for a couple of years until I "saw the light," as it were).
What would be intriguing were if Windows had nabbed the top 5 spots...
Re:Before the *BSD is Dying trolls start...
by
Blikank
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· Score: 1, Informative
If you look at the chart, 2 of the top 5 ARE running Windows 2000.
Re:Before the *BSD is Dying trolls start...
by
Alan+Cox
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· Score: 4, Informative
I don't see anything intriguing there. The Linux clock wraps at 497 days. It's also not "intriguing" as such because FreeBSD is an extremely stable OS.
I am suprised AIX didn't show up in the top five I must admit
Re:Before the *BSD is Dying trolls start...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
As of right now (7:49 AM Mountain Time), 4 out of the top 10 are Win2k.
Re:Before the *BSD is Dying trolls start...
by
eht
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· Score: 4, Informative
Blame everything on the Linux clock wrapping at 497 days, well you might want to have that fixed eh?
I'd like it fixed so it can stopped being used as an excuse.
Or you could read the article and find it has nothing to do with anyone's uptime clock, it's by failed req% in the month of June, but that would be too hard.
Re:Before the *BSD is Dying trolls start...
by
FattMattP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
But he's not the one using this "bug" as an excuse.
An excuse for what? Netcraft checks your uptime by pinging your machine. They aren't going to be able to log into your machine and check the internal counter that keeps track of your uptime. The limit in the Linux counter has no relevance here.
Re:Before the *BSD is Dying trolls start...
by
nacturation
·
· Score: 2, Informative
An excuse for what? Netcraft checks your uptime by pinging your machine. They aren't going to be able to log into your machine and check the internal counter that keeps track of your uptime. The limit in the Linux counter has no relevance here.
Which operating systems provide uptime information ?
Operating systems we can usually work out uptimes for are:
BSD/OS
FreeBSD [but not the default configuration in versions 3 to 4.3]
HP-UX [recent versions]
IRIX
Linux 2.1 kernel and later, except on Alpha processor based systems
Solaris 2.6 and later
Windows 2000
Windows Server 2003
Windows XP
Operating systems that do not provide uptime information include;
AIX
AS/400
Compaq Tru64
DG/UX
MacOS
MacOSX
NT3/Windows 95
NT4/Windows 98
NetBSD/OpenBSD
NetWare
OS/2
OS/390
SCO UNIX
SunOS 4
VM
Additionally HP-UX, Linux, Solaris and recent releases of FreeBSD cycle back to zero after 497 days, exactly as if the machine had been rebooted at that precise point. Thus it is not possible to see a HP-UX, Linux or Solaris system with an uptime measurement above 497 days.
Why do some Operating Systems never show uptimes above 497 days ?
The method that Netcraft uses to determine the uptime of a server is bounded by an upper limit of 497 days for some Operating Systems (see above). It is therefore not possible to see uptimes for these systems that go beyond this upper limit. Although we could in theory attempt to compute the true uptime for OS's with this upper limit by monitoring for restarts at the expected time, we prefer not to do this as it can be inaccurate and error prone.
-- Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I'm in the same situation. Use Open for Firewall computeres, Free for everything else. Stable and easy to maintain. The easy to maintain part is about the most important to me.
Interesting
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
What is even more interesting is that if you go to the site that has the actual to-the-minute results of this performance test, and not the static screenshot that the article linked contains, you'll find that FreeBSD is no longer all five of the top five spots:
www.nyi.net - FreeBSD
www.about.com - FreeBSD
www.nac.net - Windows 2000
www.interland.net - Windows 2000
www.inetu.net - FreeBSD
www.jumpline.com - Linux
www.myhosting.com - Windows 2000
www.expresstech.com - Windows 2000
www.hostopia.com - Linux
www.verio.com - Solaris
Intriguing how Windows 2000 has fluttered into a good number of the top spots.
Re:Interesting
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
Also note how Microsoft fail it! A company that makes operating systems completely unsuited for production servers.
No particular order
by
nuggz
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· Score: 3, Informative
And if you look at the data you see. The top 40+ have no failed requests, and it is just minor differences in response times, and it isn't overly clear if they are even sorted by that.
You say that, but I believe that netcraft detects the OS based on responses to queries sent to the webserver.
Nmap, on the other hand, detects the OS based on the random-number sequence generation of TCP packets.
How does this affect things? Well, if you have a load balancer or firewall that forwards the HTTP connection to another webserver somewhere, then nmap will return the OS of the firewall or load balancer, whereas netcraft will return the OS of the final webserver.
Re:I'd agree, but
by
gregmac
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· Score: 2, Informative
Anyone who allows a machine to go more than 30 days without a reboot is asking for trouble.
I disagree. While 500 days is quite a few, there's no problem as long as you're diligent. Set up a script to do backups to another system on a regular basis (daily, weekly). I do incremental backups every workday at midnight using rsync. Which means if you mogrify a file, you have up to a week to get back an old copy. I used to have this go to a tape drive, and the tapes just had to be swapped out weekly. Now I just ocasionally archive to CD.
As far as disks dying, RAID1 helps, and is very cheap now and available on many mobo's. With an older server, maybe you don't have this, but maybe if it's a concern, its time to upgrade. Bigger servers often have RAID arrays already.
If you're making any major system changes - ie, the way things boot - then be sure to test it out. Be sure it boots after you make the change and are sitting right in front of it. I'll also assume you're not going to be making changes like this on a mission-critical production server, and actually testing them out on another system first. If you have a production server that you make major changes to without testing, I think it's obvious that you're asking for a disaster.
-- Speak before you think
Re:I'd agree, but
by
jdhutchins
·
· Score: 2, Informative
These are all problems that affect individual servers. If you have the money to keep a site up and running for 500+ days, chances are you have load balancing and more than one server. If one server dies, and you have it set up right, you won't have any downtime. You can also take time to do mantainance on one server, and the other servers can pick up the slack.
If one machine dieing brought down Google, they'd probably be constantly down with the number of machines they have. However, they have enough machines, and it's set up correctly, so that it doesn't matter if just one dies.
Re:Liars!!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
you are an idiot. that i686-pc-linux-gnu is YOUR SYSTEM. NMAP GIVES THIS TO YOU WHEN IT CAN'T FINGER PRINT THE REMOTE SYSTEM, SO IF YOU SEND THE PRINT TO FYDOR, HE CAN TELL WHAT SYSTEM YOU RAN NMAP FROM!!
*clue bat completed*
Re:amen to that
by
Bruce+Perens
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Change the Cat5?!?!!? Why aren't you running heartbeat? You need never drop a single packet.
Slashdot Mirror
What would be intriguing were if Windows had nabbed the top 5 spots...
I hate MS, but man, Win2k is a great operating system.
Netcraft says Netcraft is using FreeBSD
I'm in the same situation. Use Open for Firewall computeres, Free for everything else. Stable and easy to maintain. The easy to maintain part is about the most important to me.
Intriguing how Windows 2000 has fluttered into a good number of the top spots.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/Hosters
And if you look at the data you see.
The top 40+ have no failed requests, and it is just minor differences in response times, and it isn't overly clear if they are even sorted by that.
You say that, but I believe that netcraft detects the OS based on responses to queries sent to the webserver.
Nmap, on the other hand, detects the OS based on the random-number sequence generation of TCP packets.
How does this affect things? Well, if you have a load balancer or firewall that forwards the HTTP connection to another webserver somewhere, then nmap will return the OS of the firewall or load balancer, whereas netcraft will return the OS of the final webserver.
I disagree. While 500 days is quite a few, there's no problem as long as you're diligent. Set up a script to do backups to another system on a regular basis (daily, weekly). I do incremental backups every workday at midnight using rsync. Which means if you mogrify a file, you have up to a week to get back an old copy. I used to have this go to a tape drive, and the tapes just had to be swapped out weekly. Now I just ocasionally archive to CD.
As far as disks dying, RAID1 helps, and is very cheap now and available on many mobo's. With an older server, maybe you don't have this, but maybe if it's a concern, its time to upgrade. Bigger servers often have RAID arrays already.
If you're making any major system changes - ie, the way things boot - then be sure to test it out. Be sure it boots after you make the change and are sitting right in front of it. I'll also assume you're not going to be making changes like this on a mission-critical production server, and actually testing them out on another system first. If you have a production server that you make major changes to without testing, I think it's obvious that you're asking for a disaster.
Speak before you think
These are all problems that affect individual servers. If you have the money to keep a site up and running for 500+ days, chances are you have load balancing and more than one server. If one server dies, and you have it set up right, you won't have any downtime. You can also take time to do mantainance on one server, and the other servers can pick up the slack.
If one machine dieing brought down Google, they'd probably be constantly down with the number of machines they have. However, they have enough machines, and it's set up correctly, so that it doesn't matter if just one dies.
# www.interland.net - Windows 2000 :6 9B0%O=80%C=-1)
LIAR!!
nmap -O www.interland.net gives
TCP/IP fingerprint:
SInfo(V=3.00%P=i686-pc-linux-gnu%D=7/13%Time=3F11
you are an idiot. that i686-pc-linux-gnu is YOUR SYSTEM. NMAP GIVES THIS TO YOU WHEN IT CAN'T FINGER PRINT THE REMOTE SYSTEM, SO IF YOU SEND THE PRINT TO FYDOR, HE CAN TELL WHAT SYSTEM YOU RAN NMAP FROM!! *clue bat completed*
Change the Cat5?!?!!? Why aren't you running heartbeat? You need never drop a single packet.
Bruce Perens.