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."
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: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
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.