Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

DIY Carrier Grade Linux with Debian

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cool-for-your-home-switchboard dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Carrier Grade Linux, once the domain of big-bucks Bells and commercial software vendors, just became more attainable for universities, companies running high-availability web services, and average Linux hackers interested in learning what goes into the world's most reliable, maintainable, and available systems. The Debian project, backed by HP, has launched the Debian-Carrier Grade Linux subproject, and registered Debian-CGL with version 2.02 of the CGL spec. LinuxDevices has created a simplified version of the registration form that lets you see which Debian packages to apt-get, and which packages you'll have to download and compile out side of Debian, in order to get your own Carrier Grade Linux setup."

5 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. I had no idea what carrier grade means by Nate+Fox · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Grade_Linux

    Carrier Grade Linux' is a set of specifications which detail standards of availability, scalability, manageability, and service response characteristics which must be met in order for Linux to be considered "carrier-grade" (i.e. ready for use within the telecommunications industry). The term is particularly applicable as telecom converges technically with data networks and commercial off-the-shelf commoditized components such as blade servers.

  2. Wikipedia by flood6 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I was lost as hell over this summary and even TFAs. Here's some help, apparently "Carrier-Grade" refers to telecommunications carriers, which can typically accept no more than 30 seconds to 5 minutes of downtime per year from their servers.

    --
    SEO Firefox Extension
    1. Re:Wikipedia by parc · · Score: 2, Informative

      You're mistaking carrier-grade voice service with a data SLA.
      Carrier-grade services require that a telco provide dialtone, routing, completion, and ring within certain time limits a certain percentage of the time. In all my years of dealing with telcos, I've only missed a dialtone twice. I've gotten failed routing far more often, but still well within 99.999% of the time. My data circuits, on the other hand, have failed often.

  3. Carrier-grade Windows? by ortholattice · · Score: 2, Informative
    Although the concept struck me as amusing, given that carrier-grade requires 99.999 (5 nines) to 99.9999 (6 nines) percent reliability, still I couldn't imagine that MS would allow itself to be trumped by this.

    And, sure enough: from Google, "carrier grade Linux" - 114000 hits, "carrier grade Windows" - 17 hits (but still, not 0). The top Windows hit is from 1998: "a Microsoft white paper available at SUPERCOMM '98 will discuss carrier-grade Windows NT Server-based systems." Well, at least they talked about it, you gotta give them credit for that. Haven't heard much about it since, though.

  4. Carrier grade doesnt count scheduled downtime. by BrookHarty · · Score: 3, Informative

    Thats the dirty little secret, scheduled downtime. As long as you schedule the downtime, its still carrier grade. I've yet to see a service even with maintenance windows stay up for a month. Service in terms of big pile of servers running multiple applications with a big fat database cluster behind it. YMMV.