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."
I'd agree that server reliability depends on the O/S used, reliability has much more to do with the installation and setup of the server.
So, congratulations should go out to the sys admins of those servers.
-- rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
Re:I'd agree, but
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Longer uptimes mean the chance of having a unpatched security hole is greater. My FreeBSD machine makes and re-installs world at least once a month and more if security holes are found. IMHO those admins should not be congratulated for their laziness/incompetance/stupidity/ego.
Re:I'd agree, but
by
Ziest
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Agree. Long uptimes are a recipe for disaster. 2 things can go wrong 1) the system on disk has changed under the system in memory. Broken or missing shared libraries and init scripts. 2) my fav, the disks stop spinning. This is lots of fun. Try it some time. Go to one of your older machine, the one with 500 plus days of uptime. Shut it down, remove the power cord, wait 3 minutes, reattach the power cord, put your finger on the power switch. OK, gentlemen, place your bets. Will all the disks spinup? If they do not, you get to find out how good your backups really are. When was the last time you backed that system up? When was the last time you verified the backup? A simple "Put more memory into this machine" becomes 3 or 4 days of living hell as you run around trying to figure out what happened, try to reconstruct the contents of that dead disk. Fun, fun, fun.
Anyone who allows a machine to go more than 30 days without a reboot is asking for trouble. There is a reason why mainframers have a maintenance window every Sunday.
-- Another day closer to redwood heaven
Re:I'd agree, but
by
buss_error
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Agree. Long uptimes are a recipe for disaster. 2 things can go wrong 1) the system on disk has changed under the system in memory. Broken or missing shared libraries and init scripts.
You're the admin. You're supposed to check for this. If the system isn't all that important, I may add patches without checking them on a test system, but if it's important, no patches get added until they are checked on a test system.
2) my fav, the disks stop spinning. This is lots of fun. Try it some time.
You're the admin. You're supposed to be doing backups. Personally, if I think there's a good chance that the drives will fail when I'm doing something ( eg: greater than.5 percent) I make 2 back ups. Tapes can break. Also, I've not seen disks refuse to spin up with out powering off for a while (more than 5 minues). Frequently, you can get the disks spinning again by (gently!) tapping them with a screwdriver. If that doesn't work, sometimes heating them with a lightbulb will work. Heatlamps work too, but you need to be careful not to overheat the drive. I also try to get drives on critical systems replaced every 2 to 3 years. RAID helps here.
Keeping the network, hardware, OS, and applications up is important, but just as important is abuse response. There are a few hosting companies out there that do a wonderful job of keeping things ticking over, but fail absolutely at terminating abusive accounts. Hosting at one of these sites is inviting having your email blocked at the very least. Some sites block all traffic based on what's in the block lists. Part of due dilligence is checking the history of a host by checking at SPEWS, SPAMHAUS, SPAMCOP, News.Admin.Net-Abuse.email, News.Admin.Net-Abuse.Sightings, and other customer's experiences.
I can't find my link to the dead tree report I use to check out hosting companies at the moment, but there are several very nice writeups out there that focus on choosing a good hosting/co-lo company.
-- Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Re:I'd agree, but
by
secolactico
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
A simple "Put more memory into this machine" becomes 3 or 4 days of living hell
Ah, but the realist (pesimist) admin will always hope for the best and plan for the worst. Critical machines/services need to have standby hardware. If I need to do a hw upgrade/software patch on a production machine, I'll make sure the standby machine is up to date and working before touching the main production machine. That way, If I I can't bring the machine back up in 10 mins, I'll know I have a Plan B machine.
Same goes for any other network equipment. I've seen "carrier class" switches that simply decide to go south upon removal of a hot-swappable module (going by the book).
Isn't that true of *any* solid server OS? If you get it set up correctly then leave it, most machines will run until the hardware dies.
I personally don't know many real Linux production servers (as opposed to bobs personal box) where the admins mess with kernel patches - ever. They normally use a stable distro, normally Debian or one of the older Red Hats, and just leave it.
Re:Before the *BSD is Dying trolls start...
by
qortra
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I guess I'll have to disagree with both you and AC. I think it's intriguing if any particular OS nabs all top 5 spots; I (and apparently the folks at Netcraft) imagine there would be more variety at the top. There are many other very stable OSes out there, such as some flavours of GNU/Linux (read "Debian-Stable"). But all that to say that I'd rather not nitpick Netcraft about one particular word. In the past they have chosen to put a humorous twist on server uptime data (an otherwise dry topic), and I have always liked the result.
Re:Before the *BSD is Dying trolls start...
by
swb
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I am suprised AIX didn't show up in the top five I must admit
Are there hosting providers using AIX in their hosting environments? I would think that RS6000s would be just too expensive in comparison to blades or generic 1 or 2U x86s for hosting environments.
I'm sure there's some popularity in ASP environments where you're providing an entire application (interface, DB, logic, etc), but for basic hosting it sounds like it'd be unaffordable to use RS6000.
In fact I only reboot my OpenBSD boxes when there is a security hole (you know how often that is!)
Yes, we do. They can't even go 7 years without a root hole in the default install. Pathetic;)
The thing that made me switch to *BSD, however, was not the security or the stability. It was the documentation. Nowhere else have I found such a wealth of (well written) documentation as I discovered on installing FreeBSD.
Re:This is not surprising.
by
swb
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
My feeling is that the main difference between FreeBSD and Linux distros is that FreeBSD is a complete *system*. Linux too often feels like a GUI glued onto an operating environment that itself is a kernel glued onto a bunch of utilities.
FreeBSD seems like somebody paid more attention to the components, and a good number are unique to FreeBSD and not GNU parts. Even the contrib aspects of FreeBSD (gcc, sendmail, etc) are well integrated and not just bolted on.
Re:My trials with *BSD
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Come on! This is a macintosh troll, not a *bsd troll! You fucked it up!
You missed the point
by
taxman457f
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you read the article you would see: A summary showing the ten providers whose sites experienced the fewest failed requests and the fasest connection times during June
So this one is about performance, not uptime.
So the fact that Freebsd tops out on performance *and* uptimes is pretty amazing. What I will give you that you are correct about, is the performance is highly dependent on the hardware and the skill of the techs. Uptime is not everything for sure.
"There's no magic bullet for uptime." Well if it *is* uptime you're looking for, the closest to a magic bullet you can get is FreeBSD or BSD/OS. 5 years is a damn long time.
essentially the top 50 uptimes ever, is fully dominated by BSD
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.last.html
AIX for web hosting
by
macwhiz
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Are there hosting providers using AIX in their hosting environments? I would think that RS6000s would be just too expensive in comparison to blades or generic 1 or 2U x86s for hosting environments.
I worked at a major telco ISP that used AIX. In fact, not only were the web services hosted on AIX, but they were hosted on a RS/6000 SP2 parallel supercomputer.
This sounds like overkill, and in some ways, it is... but the SP2 is, in essence, a very fancy rack. Each SP2 frame has a number of nodes in it; each node is a self-contained RS/6000 system. The major difference in an SP2 node is that it has a SP Switch connection. The SP Switch is a very high speed switch fabric that allows the nodes to communicate. Combined with heavy-duty software and fault-tolerant design, you wind up with a parallel supercomputer...
...or one heck of a rack system that lets you run the nodes as individual servers, or in clusters, with lots of bandwidth and control.
For a service provider that wants to lure people in with a low starting cost, and hope that turnover from downtime isn't too bad, AIX can be expensive. I used to dislike AIX, because of its reputation as "not quite UNIX." Once I had the opportunity to use it, I found that it really is well suited to many ISP tasks. AIX has inherited a lot of attitude from IBM's mainframe days. IBM's mainframes were used in "can't go down" environments. AIX has many features that share that design philosophy.
As for the cost... as with any major manufacturer system, there's the published cost, and there's the cost you negotiate. If you are buying a whole setup, you can usually cut a deal. Of course, if you're buying major manufacturer equipment, you're already committed to paying more than you would for a white-box open source system, presumably because you want advanced features that haven't made it into OSS yet, or you want support.
(I've found that IBM's AIX support kicks ass. When I'd call Sun, even with a Platinum contract, I'd usually get someone who'd do the same SunSolve search I already tried, then promise to get back to me some day. Calling IBM gets results... they will put as many people into conference as they have to in order to get enough subject-area experts talking to figure out the problem and resolve it, preferably on the same call. A far cry from "RTFM and then post to the mailing list!")
The only ISP task that I found AIX had trouble supporting was INN. At least at the time I was working with it, AIX had resource limitations that caused trouble for very large INN installations. (This ISP was working with a two terabyte news spool.)
Looking at the whole 50
by
LooseChanj
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I see the lowest freebsd is #41. The lowest Solaris 8 is #49. Lowest linux is #48. Lowest Win2k is #47.
Those are the 3 OSen which comprise the top 10, which has 5 fbsd, 2 Solaris 8, 2 Win2k, and 1 linux.
Totals for the top 50 are 10 Freebsd, 15 linux, 8 Solaris 8s, 2 'Solaris', 12 Win2k, 1 NT4/Win98 box admin'ed by a crack smoking monkey, and a lone HP-UX. (I know missed one somewhere, but screw it...I'm not recounting.)
Now, what does this tell us? There are FreeBSD users at the top and bottom. Same for Solaris 8 and Win2k. Linux too. OS doesn't really seem to be much of a factor. Hardware and network reliability I would expect to be more relevant.
My conclusion? The people who chose these things, along with the OS, and setup and maintain them, to land themselves in the top 5 must have made better decisions than the rest. That the people who chose the most reliable hardware and networks also chose FreeBSD...well, it only goes to show.:-)
-- Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
Operating system has nothing to do w/ reliability
by
chrysalis
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
IMHO the reliability of an ISP has nothing to do with the backend operating systems, especially when the study only considers the OS of the public web servers.
I'm sure that even a Win95 based ISP can provide a very reliable service. It's only a matter of redundancy.
On the other hand, the company I'm working for runs FreeBSD on its web and mail servers, but thanks to the dumb way things are installed and the lack of redundancy, a global uptime of 24 hours would be an all-time record.
With no possible single point of failure, with load balancers and correct usage of protocols like HSRP, service can be guaranteed even if some servers are continously crashing.
Have you ever seen Google unreachable? I've always seen it up. Although Google runs Linux. But they have properly designed their network for high availability. In an old Slashdot article, there was an interview of a Google techie who explained that if 1, 2 or 100 servers were down, it would have absolutely no impact on the service.
So at least for ISPs, I really think what matters is the skills of the network administrators. It brings another question : does the skills actually depends on the operating system they use?
Maybe. At least when you read mailing-lists of different operating systems, you can clearly see some common interests of the related subscribers. _This_ is really what makes differences between free operating systems. When it comes to reliability for traditional ISP services, either OpenBSD, Linux, FreeBSD or even Win2000 are quite comparable nowadays.
-- {{.sig}}
What is with all the
by
G00F
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
What is with all the 100's of anonymous postings about feeBSD/*BSD is dead/dieing. There are 3 or 4 different posts, but cut and pasted everywhere.
It is like there are people being paid to spam this site with anti-BSD.
*BSD is still being worked on, is very stable/secure, and is used proffesionaly. So quit with the propoganda.
-- The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Re:BUT...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
It's fair to say that no matter how hard you cook the stats, one undeniable truth remains: overall, *BSD is a colossal failure.
Now why did *BSD fail? There's the question.
Once you get past the
fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of
incompatible kernels, there is the historical
record of failure and of failed operating
systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about
15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it
has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps
losing market share but why? Is it the problematic
personalities of many of the key players? Or is
it larger than their troubled personalities?
The record is clear on one thing: no operating
system has ever come back from the grave.
Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from
spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead.
As the situation grows more desperate for the
adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold.
An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud
over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope
is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in.
Now is the end time for *BSD.
Too Close to Call
by
GoRK
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
When you start getting into the territory of best uptime and fastest response between all network providers in the entire world, the game simply becomes too close to call, and the ordering of the hosts becomes simply the luck of the draw (that's why not one month of this set of NetCraft statistics is very consistent with any other month) Without monitoring statistics from both inside and outside for all these networks, it is virtually impossible to rank them all.
Just because some provider responds to a DNS or web query 1ms faster than the next guy doesn't mean they are a more reliable provider. Maybe they just have fewer customers and, thus, a little bit smaller DNS database or more room to 'spread out' the users between different machines. I know netcraft monitors from various geographical and network-isolated locations on the Internet, but the law of averages doesn't help them much here. Say they monitor from 100 hosts and one of those 100 hosts has a "connection reset by peer" type TCP (RST) error due to a local router (ie not the provider's problem) doing a DNS query and it logs a time of 100ms instead of 15ms and one failed attempt? It might not happen to the other guy's host monitored even 200ms later.
Netcraft would have to be monitoring from very large numbers of machines (100,000+) to even come close to being able to tell the difference between these networks from outside. I have a feeling most all of them on the list are very good and reliable, and aside from uptime, reliability means more than the response time of your DNS or web servers. No matter what OS or network gear you use, when you introduce redundancy and failover, you necessarily introduce more equipment and more complexity that will slow things down an inconsequential amount at the gain of another '9' or whatnot.
Anyway, the point is, don't take the order of this list too seriously. The fact that any company is on the list means they have made a serious effort to provide a good and reliable network.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd agree that server reliability depends on the O/S used, reliability has much more to do with the installation and setup of the server.
So, congratulations should go out to the sys admins of those servers.
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
I personally don't know many real Linux production servers (as opposed to bobs personal box) where the admins mess with kernel patches - ever. They normally use a stable distro, normally Debian or one of the older Red Hats, and just leave it.
I guess I'll have to disagree with both you and AC. I think it's intriguing if any particular OS nabs all top 5 spots; I (and apparently the folks at Netcraft) imagine there would be more variety at the top. There are many other very stable OSes out there, such as some flavours of GNU/Linux (read "Debian-Stable"). But all that to say that I'd rather not nitpick Netcraft about one particular word. In the past they have chosen to put a humorous twist on server uptime data (an otherwise dry topic), and I have always liked the result.
I am suprised AIX didn't show up in the top five I must admit
Are there hosting providers using AIX in their hosting environments? I would think that RS6000s would be just too expensive in comparison to blades or generic 1 or 2U x86s for hosting environments.
I'm sure there's some popularity in ASP environments where you're providing an entire application (interface, DB, logic, etc), but for basic hosting it sounds like it'd be unaffordable to use RS6000.
Yes, we do. They can't even go 7 years without a root hole in the default install. Pathetic ;)
The thing that made me switch to *BSD, however, was not the security or the stability. It was the documentation. Nowhere else have I found such a wealth of (well written) documentation as I discovered on installing FreeBSD.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
My feeling is that the main difference between FreeBSD and Linux distros is that FreeBSD is a complete *system*. Linux too often feels like a GUI glued onto an operating environment that itself is a kernel glued onto a bunch of utilities.
FreeBSD seems like somebody paid more attention to the components, and a good number are unique to FreeBSD and not GNU parts. Even the contrib aspects of FreeBSD (gcc, sendmail, etc) are well integrated and not just bolted on.
Come on! This is a macintosh troll, not a *bsd troll! You fucked it up!
If you read the article you would see:
A summary showing the ten providers whose sites experienced the fewest failed requests and the fasest connection times during June
So this one is about performance, not uptime.
So the fact that Freebsd tops out on performance *and* uptimes is pretty amazing. What I will give you that you are correct about, is the performance is highly dependent on the hardware and the skill of the techs. Uptime is not everything for sure.
"There's no magic bullet for uptime." Well if it *is* uptime you're looking for, the closest to a magic bullet you can get is FreeBSD or BSD/OS. 5 years is a damn long time.
essentially the top 50 uptimes ever, is fully dominated by BSD
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.last.html
I worked at a major telco ISP that used AIX. In fact, not only were the web services hosted on AIX, but they were hosted on a RS/6000 SP2 parallel supercomputer.
This sounds like overkill, and in some ways, it is... but the SP2 is, in essence, a very fancy rack. Each SP2 frame has a number of nodes in it; each node is a self-contained RS/6000 system. The major difference in an SP2 node is that it has a SP Switch connection. The SP Switch is a very high speed switch fabric that allows the nodes to communicate. Combined with heavy-duty software and fault-tolerant design, you wind up with a parallel supercomputer...
...or one heck of a rack system that lets you run the nodes as individual servers, or in clusters, with lots of bandwidth and control.
For a service provider that wants to lure people in with a low starting cost, and hope that turnover from downtime isn't too bad, AIX can be expensive. I used to dislike AIX, because of its reputation as "not quite UNIX." Once I had the opportunity to use it, I found that it really is well suited to many ISP tasks. AIX has inherited a lot of attitude from IBM's mainframe days. IBM's mainframes were used in "can't go down" environments. AIX has many features that share that design philosophy.
As for the cost... as with any major manufacturer system, there's the published cost, and there's the cost you negotiate. If you are buying a whole setup, you can usually cut a deal. Of course, if you're buying major manufacturer equipment, you're already committed to paying more than you would for a white-box open source system, presumably because you want advanced features that haven't made it into OSS yet, or you want support.
(I've found that IBM's AIX support kicks ass. When I'd call Sun, even with a Platinum contract, I'd usually get someone who'd do the same SunSolve search I already tried, then promise to get back to me some day. Calling IBM gets results... they will put as many people into conference as they have to in order to get enough subject-area experts talking to figure out the problem and resolve it, preferably on the same call. A far cry from "RTFM and then post to the mailing list!")
The only ISP task that I found AIX had trouble supporting was INN. At least at the time I was working with it, AIX had resource limitations that caused trouble for very large INN installations. (This ISP was working with a two terabyte news spool.)
I see the lowest freebsd is #41. The lowest Solaris 8 is #49. Lowest linux is #48. Lowest Win2k is #47.
:-)
Those are the 3 OSen which comprise the top 10, which has 5 fbsd, 2 Solaris 8, 2 Win2k, and 1 linux.
Totals for the top 50 are 10 Freebsd, 15 linux, 8 Solaris 8s, 2 'Solaris', 12 Win2k, 1 NT4/Win98 box admin'ed by a crack smoking monkey, and a lone HP-UX. (I know missed one somewhere, but screw it...I'm not recounting.)
Now, what does this tell us? There are FreeBSD users at the top and bottom. Same for Solaris 8 and Win2k. Linux too. OS doesn't really seem to be much of a factor. Hardware and network reliability I would expect to be more relevant.
My conclusion? The people who chose these things, along with the OS, and setup and maintain them, to land themselves in the top 5 must have made better decisions than the rest. That the people who chose the most reliable hardware and networks also chose FreeBSD...well, it only goes to show.
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
IMHO the reliability of an ISP has nothing to do with the backend operating systems, especially when the study only considers the OS of the public web servers.
I'm sure that even a Win95 based ISP can provide a very reliable service. It's only a matter of redundancy.
On the other hand, the company I'm working for runs FreeBSD on its web and mail servers, but thanks to the dumb way things are installed and the lack of redundancy, a global uptime of 24 hours would be an all-time record.
With no possible single point of failure, with load balancers and correct usage of protocols like HSRP, service can be guaranteed even if some servers are continously crashing.
Have you ever seen Google unreachable? I've always seen it up. Although Google runs Linux. But they have properly designed their network for high availability. In an old Slashdot article, there was an interview of a Google techie who explained that if 1, 2 or 100 servers were down, it would have absolutely no impact on the service.
So at least for ISPs, I really think what matters is the skills of the network administrators. It brings another question : does the skills actually depends on the operating system they use?
Maybe. At least when you read mailing-lists of different operating systems, you can clearly see some common interests of the related subscribers. _This_ is really what makes differences between free operating systems. When it comes to reliability for traditional ISP services, either OpenBSD, Linux, FreeBSD or even Win2000 are quite comparable nowadays.
{{.sig}}
What is with all the 100's of anonymous postings about feeBSD/*BSD is dead/dieing. There are 3 or 4 different posts, but cut and pasted everywhere.
It is like there are people being paid to spam this site with anti-BSD.
*BSD is still being worked on, is very stable/secure, and is used proffesionaly. So quit with the propoganda.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
When you start getting into the territory of best uptime and fastest response between all network providers in the entire world, the game simply becomes too close to call, and the ordering of the hosts becomes simply the luck of the draw (that's why not one month of this set of NetCraft statistics is very consistent with any other month) Without monitoring statistics from both inside and outside for all these networks, it is virtually impossible to rank them all.
Just because some provider responds to a DNS or web query 1ms faster than the next guy doesn't mean they are a more reliable provider. Maybe they just have fewer customers and, thus, a little bit smaller DNS database or more room to 'spread out' the users between different machines. I know netcraft monitors from various geographical and network-isolated locations on the Internet, but the law of averages doesn't help them much here. Say they monitor from 100 hosts and one of those 100 hosts has a "connection reset by peer" type TCP (RST) error due to a local router (ie not the provider's problem) doing a DNS query and it logs a time of 100ms instead of 15ms and one failed attempt? It might not happen to the other guy's host monitored even 200ms later.
Netcraft would have to be monitoring from very large numbers of machines (100,000+) to even come close to being able to tell the difference between these networks from outside. I have a feeling most all of them on the list are very good and reliable, and aside from uptime, reliability means more than the response time of your DNS or web servers. No matter what OS or network gear you use, when you introduce redundancy and failover, you necessarily introduce more equipment and more complexity that will slow things down an inconsequential amount at the gain of another '9' or whatnot.
Anyway, the point is, don't take the order of this list too seriously. The fact that any company is on the list means they have made a serious effort to provide a good and reliable network.
~GoRK