Slashdot Mirror
A Look Inside the BBC's Network
the-dark-kangaroo writes "The BBC have provided the entire internet with a look inside their amazing network. It shows everyone the almighty web power they are with over 40 webservers and 12 firewalls and their 8Gbps intersite connections. All this seems to running some form of *NIX with perl underlying their powerful website delivery. Take a look at those load graphs!"
Geez, having an awful time getting access to the graphs and all that fun data. So much for that 8gbps then huh?
As a network engineer for a large web hosting company, having worked for very large ISP's, etc all I can say is that I'm impressed. The 4 OC-12's alone coming out of NY sold me. =)
Curious that the map showing the geographical distribution of the network centres shows only the USA and Europe. Is this because the bulk of the audience is there?
Has anyone dug through the data and found country usage statistics?, now that I would find interesting.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I seem to recall that a link to that page was present in each highly-modded comment in each story regarding "Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy part 3 on BBC radio 4" we had back in... September 2004?
So, old news!
Indeed, how is this "news" at all?
(I may need to "get out more" - whatever that phrase means.)
Doing a search of their site reveals no occurance of "Perl".
Seastead this.
its slashdotting like a man.
I got the page load in ~8 seconds when comment counter said 30...thats about when most sites have smoke coming out of the servers.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
The overview diagram points to a directory, so it can be virtually hosted anywhere, further distributing the load.
Maybe they'd be kind enough to measure the /. effect and post a separate graph showing traffic with referrals from slashdot? Now that would be neato...
Cheers, guys! Steady on!
The network infrastructure throughout the BBC, certainly in News, is so microsoft centric it's unheard of. The network has recently been sold, along with the staff, to Siemens. It's based around Active Directory, all file servers are Windows, all DNS and DHCP is maintined by windows, with only a smattering of *nix boxes (DHCP at one london office, unix for parts of the BBC-Wide Imaging system "elvis" and "Jupiter"). The desktop is 2K/XP, and so locked down we cant even run the BBC News Ticker on it! (For what it's worth, everyone in my office ignores such policies as we need things like Putty and VNC to work)
BBC technical guys are wizards, on this kind of stuff. In the 1960s, an engineer by the name of Delia Derbyshire could get sound generators to do stuff even the designers had no idea they were capable of. The BBC's tech division has always been horribly underfunded, but if they had a decent budget, a lot of R&D companies would be wise to fear them.
(Their "open source" video codec and codec distribution system are two examples of what they can do in their free time.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Step 4: Fix issues
Step 5: See Step 1
You forgot:
Step 6: ???
Step 7: Profit!!!!
Just try that on news.bbc.co.uk, Slashdot won't even make it break a sweat.
news.bbc.co.uk was one of two news websites that I could get to on 9-11. The other was Slashdot.
Ahem. Looks like Slashdot't HTML detection code ate part of my post.
SunOS 4.x is BSD based. SunOS 5.x is SVR4.
Funded by the license fee, plus a few million direct from the Foreign Office for BBC World Service.
And adverts on BBC World, and subs from BBC America... but the license fee is the essence of course, which is why Rupert Murdoch would like it abolished, even tho his Sky operation extracts more cash from the public than the BBC does already...
I'm sure there's a nice graph in the annual report somewhere.