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Windows Servers Beat Linux Servers
RobbeR49 writes "Windows Server 2003 was recently compared against Linux and Unix variants in a survey by the Yankee Group, with Windows having a higher annual uptime than Linux. Unix was the big winner, however, beating both Windows and Linux in annual uptime. From the article: 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from "niche" open source vendors, are offline more and longer than either Windows or Unix competitors, the survey said. The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation.' Yankee Group is claiming no bias in the survey as they were not sponsored by any particular OS vendor."
Lets look at last years survey being debunked in a business week analysis. ('cause I'm sure not a damn thing's changed since last year's study).
The biggest criticism of the study is this:
Only people running w2k3 AND linux were allowed to respond. Hmmmmmn, so how many MS shops with an evaluation linux server (installed by their clueless MSCE) were included in this "survey"
Yankee group can claim no bias all they like - but I am sick of Laura DiDio fud being posted here (Oh she of 'SCO's claims are justified after looking at the source' fame).
Call this ad-hominem if you like, but if someone pushes a POV year in, year out, you tend to dismiss them.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
What's the use of this?
That means that Red Hat Linux has to have at least 1,461 hours of annual downtime, which is 60 days. (This is so that it would then have no more 5,844 hours of annual uptime, in order to allow 20% more of that to fit into one year at 365.25 days.)
I don't think so.
I hate writers who don't understand math.
I have run both windows servers and linux servers over the last 10 years and my experience is higher uptime with linux servers. Windows machines deal poorly with memory leaking apps and need rebooting for every service pack or required update. I only need to restart specific processes with linux when there is a justified upgrade.
Before anyone gets emotional and decides to comment, remember these words: confirmation bias.
Maybe this is because Linux is used by more n00bs. I know my first web server (i assume thats what they are talking about?) was linux because linux is free. Most n00bs are goign to use the free alternative rather than the expensive one, and the companies using the expensive OS are going to be the companies who also pay a lot to their sys admins
Our Windows 2003 TS servers have a much longer uptime than our Linux servers that are accessed from our lab. Simply because fewer people choose to use the Windows service....
Why does Slashdot continue to even acknowledge 'studies' performed by the Yankee Group? You think we would have learned our lesson by now...
Hard evidence of collusion may be lacking, but it's still patently obvious that Laura DiDio is a Microsoft shill.
Past experience should be enough to show this, but just in case it's not clear enough yet, here's a snippet of TFA:
Translation: "We don't know how to support Linux, so it's Linux's fault."
Also from TFA:
I'll bet they did...when you turn out such a ridiculously skewed 'study', you pretty much have to make certain everyone knows how 'unbiased' it is.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
since organizations will use what works for them, not what some "paid-to-speak" mouthpiece states they should believe (smart organizations, anyway).
We'll see lots of defensiveness over this study in the comments, although if the conclusions were different, it would be cheered. Why not accept it and fix the documentation issue?
"Sufferin' succotash."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Didio
Another article claiming my OS is better than yours, another article with virtually no information, and the information therein is off-the-scale incomprehensible and inconsistent.
Here's a casual observation: the article says, "
" Later in the article, this: " Let's just say a Linux server has 24 hours of downtime a year (higher than the "survey" says). That leaves 364 days of uptime in a year, 365 days in a leap year.Implied in the article then, a Windows 2003 server would have to be "up" approximately 20% more to satisfy the "claim". Now, I am not a calendar "expert", but I'm having a difficult time believing that Windows 2003 server is up an average of 364 * 1.2, or 436.8 days a year. If it is, I'm buying.
Also from the article: "..., But standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from "niche" open source vendors, are offline more and longer than either Windows or Unix competitors, the survey said. The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation...."
First, this is a survey, it hardly points to data that support this survey, in my book a no-no when trying to prove a point. Secondly, assuming there's truthiness in this, my inference from the previous paragraph is, "Red Hat would be a little easier to set up and use if it had better documentation..."
sh$ man 'where are they hiding the documents?'
I'm glad they backed up their allegations with facts and figures...Oh wait.
Every time I see an article like this, I view it as utter crap. There are no numbers, there are no sources, and it utterly contradicts my daily experience...Well, except for the "stability of regular unix" bit, which is pretty much a no-brainer.
I run linux in a work environment, I run linux in my home environment. I get occasional hardware failures, but that's about it. Applications don't lock things up irretrivably. It needs less babying than my windows systems do, and I generally run more different applications on the linux machines than I do on the windows machines.
Windows 2003 is better than 2000, but this article is fact-free fud.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Let's for the sake of amusement Google "Yankee Group" funded microsoft
Or, let's try site:slashdot.org "Yankee Group"
Unbiased? No freaking way.
No information on how these "results" were obtained (self-reported?) or anything else that would allow people to figure out if their statistics are biased or not.
So the study wasn't funded by Microsoft? What does that tell us? If this was research done by asking Windows admins which OS they found had the greatest uptime, wouldn't you expect results along these lines? Of course, we can't know how or why these results were obtained, because the article is essentially four paragraphs saying Windows roxors, Linux is the suxor!
I'm not new here, but the hype in the article titles and the lack of content is starting to be annoying. Is it just me, or is it getting worse?
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Three to five down events per year totaling 10 to 19 hours of downtime per year? I'm not SuperAdmin, but NONE of my servers are ever down for that long or that often. Who are they letting run these boxes? What are they doing? Taking the machine into single user mode and recompiling the kernel before rebooting them or something?
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
As opposed to the overwhelming amount and quality of Windows and other proprietary software documentation? You've got to be kidding me.
Anyway, I still choose Linux! Haha!
How does documentation affect the uptime of a server?
You need documentation to make changes, not to leave the server alone.
If you're making changes you're not measuring the reliability of the OS/software, you're measuring software and admin performance.
"Windows Servers Beat Linux Servers"
I think they're using this definition of beat.
So where would *BSD fall in. Along with Linux because of the clueless people rebooting it because they don't understand /etc/init.d, or along with UNIX because (I'm linux user myself) BSD users actually do seem a bit on the more experianced side of the fence.
Granted, Windows has been more stable recently, but in my experience, everything on a Linux system can be logged, whereas half of the stuff on a Windows systems happens in a way that you can't get to it or see what's going on.
The one thing from the study that I'll readily agree with wasn't quoted in the linked article, but instead can be found here on the Yankee Group's news page:
How many times to we have to tell people that Red Hat != ALL OF LINUX.
That's like saying Windows 2003 is all of Windows. I still doubt that they played fair in FUD report.
In addition to this, they almost NEVER compare apples to apples. Apache != Linux either, just IIS != Windows.
How many patches require you to REBOOT windows to apply? Service Packs? The only thing you need to reboot Linux for is a new kernel. Did they factor that in as well?
But my guess is these guys either got MS funding from somewhere, or were fishing for some after giving this report.
Is it 20% more uptime? Or is it 20% less downtime? There's a very, very big difference there -- two months of downtime is pretty severe, and if you have that, you have some serious problems. From the reverse perspective, three nines of uptime allows for nearly nine hours of downtime per year. If that downtime is reduced by 20%, that's nice, but not really noticeable for most users.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
"Lack of documentation"? First of all there's plenty of documentation pretty much everywhere, no mwatter what *nix you use(FreeBSD and Gentoo has excellent documentation) but, doesn't Red Hat come with support? If there's something you can't figure out on your own, why not call the support you've paid for?
-- Linux user #369862
lol, same goes for video! :P
A more informative Summary of the 2006 Survey
Because GOOD Windows admins PATCH their Windows boxes every month, and therefore would not have an continuous uptime of more than about 30 days at a stretch.. meanwhile most Linux patches can be done with minimal disruption and usually without a reboot.
Nope I'm not buying this report.. and I run both Win and Linux servers.
far...out
At least someone still takes Laura and the Yankee Group seriously. Proof that Loyal fans such as Slashdot are not to be discarded easily.
For those of you unclear on the just what deserves this unerring trust, see here.
I'm sure there will be another study which says the opposite soon enough. Linux is a major player and is here to stay. MS products are fine for a lot of applications and the same for UNIX. Just throw this in with the (rest of the) FUD and move along. Besides, until MS comes along with something as cheap as Linux (free as in beer) they'll never be able to kill Linux. Let's get back to the Apple adoration, BSD is dying, PS3 is great/expensive, hot grits, flame wars and ATI/Nvidia benchmarking that we've all come to expect from Slashdot.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
"not sponsored by any particular OS vendor" notice the addition of "OS". meaning they were sponsored, by "someone". i wonder which side this "someone" is on.
Give me a fucking break. Its 2006. If your OS is down or crashes, you have bullshit admins, using a bullshit OS, or have crummy hardware or power.
I have had Linux crash in production once. In 1997, and the bug was fixed in a day or so. Also, it was my fault as a beginner admin who thought it was cool to download and install the "latest and greatest" untested kernel from kernel.org or where ever you got Linux kernels at the time.
Now, will slashdot give me serifed fonts back?
I've had HP/UX machines with 2 years of uptime. FreeBSD machines with > 1 year were common too. Usually the machine had to be moved or repurposed before it crashed.
Sun machines weren't nearly as reliable as HP, generating 10 times the number of hardware service calls. That and the 250 day bug, gave them somewhat lower uptimes.
A properly configured Linux machine is at least as reliable. How could anything have 20% more uptime than a machine that's up 99.999% of the time?
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I don't reboot my Windows Server's either because I don't like to touch them. I don't even bother putting the Linux servers on a UPS. They just work. Uptime is also a small part of what I consider when choosing a server OS. The monthly Windows updates usually want a reboot (I don't like having to wait until patch day for critical patches though). Linux keeps releasing the kernel updates so not too much better there. The applications that I will run tend to make that decision for me.
experience! Duh.
First and foremost, the whole nature of the design of Unix/Linux provides a means by which software systems can be updated without any service outage. You cannot do this with any version of Windows. Most Windows-based patches and upgrades require a system reboot, which is downtime. Most unix-based upgrades merely require a quick stop/start/HUP of the services. If their main claim is that updating system components is the basis for downtime, they're smoking crack. Maybe their methodology for testing involved taking the entire system down while they upgraded? Unix doesn't require such drastic measures - Windows probably does, as you probably can't update a running service. By design, Windows is exponentially more prone to downtime in the process of patches and upgrades. It's virtually impossible for them to compare the two OSes on this issue and not be dramatically manipulating the test methods to create bogus results that are in no way reflective of how sysadmins patch and manage their server resources. I call BULLSHIT.
I have unix servers right now with uptime measured in YEARS. There are no Windows boxes that can make that claim. Period. I've had outages on occasion due to DDOS or system probes that caused a process to terminate over the years, but I've never had any type of wholesale outage that you'd typically get with most Windows installations. Does anyone have any details on the methodology of the testing? It's obviously bogus.
Are you smoking something? I haven't found anything yet in the mass-produced consumer market that hasn't been relatively easy to get working.
I've got things from external usb sound systems to internal cards of all flavors of things made by creative to work just fine.
I think you need a new mantra.
We have a WinXP Pro box that's been up over a year ...
Another box that's Win2k pro that's been up almost 2...
The one app they run is heavily used (dispatch for a 911 center).
= Grow a brain...
I suppose for Windows 2003 servers they have computed in-between-reboots uptime which was "better" then Linux'es one.
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/ar chives/2005/04/the_truth_about_1.htmln ux/story/0,10801,82070,00.html ... "The courts are going to ultimately have to prove this, but based on what I'm seeing ... I think there is a basis that SCO has a credible case," DiDio said. "This is not a nuisance case."
s /videos/didio_video.wvx
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/li
Laura DiDio, an analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston, said she was shown two or three samples of the allegedly copied Linux code, and it appeared to her that the sections were a "copy and paste" match of the SCO Unix code that she was shown in comparison.
DiDio and the other analysts were able to view the code only under a nondisclosure agreement,
Watch the "expert" Laura Didio on video from a credible source:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/fact
Enjoy her!
*lol*
The frustration around these "studies" isn't defensiveness, it's that they're drawing conclusions based on... what? Random number pulled from a powerball machine? Paw prints their cat left on the hood of their car? Stats taken from a Diebold machine? Tea leaves in the dregs of a cuppa Earl Grey? We'll never know.
Saying that poor docs are the issue sounds correct to me (anecdotally) but there's nothing in the article to confirm this is more than FUD. The documentation issue is improving (it's still not good, or consistent, but getting better). That said, it's still easier to resolve issues by googling than by looking through TFM.
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How come I never get any of these "impartial surveys"? I have racks and racks of RHEL Linux servers that I only reboot when:
a. a machine suffers a hardware failure (fairly rare) or
b. there's a kernel update that impacts security
In the case of (b), I apply the updated rpms and reboot which normally results in a downtime of approximately 60 seconds for that server. This might happen a few times a year (single digits).
For our small number of Windows 2003 server boxes, it seems that each "windows update" cycle recommends a restart. We'll call that a once a month reboot when Microsoft gets around to releasing their monthly cleanup. Total server downtime is maybe 2-3 minutes (windows takes a bit longer to reboot on the identical hardware used with our Linux machines).
So while I *could* say that our windows servers are down XYZ percent more than our Linux servers, in terms of actual downtime, both platforms are about the same, with Linux seemingly holding a small edge in my experience.
Cheers,
I don't know about uptime, but I used to be a Linux-Only person when it came to servers. After recently falling into a job where I have had to administer Windows servers, I'll admit they are slick...... I picked up workiing with them a hell of a lot easier then I would have a Linux server (if I was new to it). Good LAN support features, ISA, Exchange, license management, fairly easy remote user/computer maintenance..... I'm probably going to give it a shot for my next home server once I get the parts. Although the software is costly if you want to learn it as a hobby (I'm getting it for my home server through MSDNAA).
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from "niche" open source vendors, are offline more and longer than either Windows or Unix competitors, the survey said. The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation."
Hmm, thats odd. Linux documentation has always been in great abundance. It's getting information about how OS interals worked that caused me the biggest OS to Application head-aches. (Both Unix and Windows)
On a broader note, said Yankee analyst Laura DiDio
Ohhhhhh, I see. Laura DiDio had her nasty little Microsoft-lead hand in this survey.
09:18:29 up 487 days, 22:39, 1 user, load average: 0.65, 0.48, 0.29
And that server is handling DNS/DHCP/RADIUS/NTP etc for the entire company.
Go ahead. Tell me that Windows can get more uptime than that server had in the past 365 days.
At this point in time there should not be any discussion of availablity. In 2006 it is just unreasonable to have a production server crash due to anything other than hardware failure.
My Linux boxes are rebooted ONLY when I upgrade the kernel or physically move them.
OK, I have about 3 years of Linux experience under my belt now. The server I maintain was setup about a year ago, it has been restarted twice since then and one time was to install new hardware, the other for a kernel update. There has been no downtime at all besides those restarts and the twenty seconds it takes to update Apache (and other packages as well) to a new version and restart it. Are these people freaking clueless?
That would be about 304 days, as 20% of 304 is 60.8 (304+60.8=364.8). The 20% must be taken as 20% of the RedHat uptime, not the Windows.
But yeah, that's way too low for RedHat.
That's not a formula that computes :-)
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Personally I don't believe this at all. I have a friend who runs a website that is 300,000 members strong, with about 1500 users online (both members and leeching guests) and his servers are almost never down because of Debian. The only time the site goes down is when MySQL crashes (last year it only happened twice, and we recovered within hours).
I know my servers, and all of my friends servers will remain *nix based.
And just by chance anyone want to donate to my Intel Xserve fund? Get myself some creamy OS X Server loving.
All of my systems are redundant. I can yank the power from one of my servers and my services don't miss a beat.
I care about servicing my customers. And that's why I haven't had a loss of service in over 4 years.
And that's why I use Linux. The OS has never crashed on me. It's at the point where the hardware is much less reliable than the OS.
According to Netcraft, they have a whopping 4 days since last reboot: http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.yanke egroup.com/
They also go with the bulletproof reliability of MS IIs
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
What the hell kind of shops/businesses/people are they surveying? People that have their servers running for a couple of days a year??
"According to the Yankee Group's annual server reliability survey . . . Windows 2003 Server, in fact, led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20 percent more annual uptime."
I would think that most businesses want to have their servers up 24/7/365 minus a few hours of scheduled reboots and upgrades, and unless something breaks or crashes. So, assume a Windows 2003 server had PERFECT uptime record for the year.
365/1.2 = 304.17. So, in order for Windows to beat Linux with 20% more uptime, they're trying to say that a server running RHEL is down more than SIXTY DAYS a year? My BS meter just crashed.
See, I know far too little about system administration. If I were to try to run a Linux server without help, it would be down all the time. If _I_ wanted a server, I'd pay someone a service feel to maintain it for me, and it would be up all the time.
So, it seems to me that ON AVERAGE, Linux servers would be down more than others, because so many people would be trying to admin themselves. The lack of documentation would definitely be a problem. (Actually, there's plenty of documentation. FINDING it is the problem. I don't know enough to come up with the right Google search terms! And posting to usenet is hit or miss.)
The question is what the uptime is like for Linux distros where you're paying out the ass for support (like you would for Windows or UNIX anyway). That's got to be such a small portion of Linux servers that it's not dragging the percentages up.
The real metric should be UPTIME / ($$ spent on support).
Be careful about those divides by zero.
First, it's a survey, not a study (technically it's a study of what particular people responded with when asked certain questions worded in a certain way). Second, a proper study would use each operating system in the same situation, since that's the practical question anyone would have: which operating system should I use in my situation, given my requirements? For all we know, each operating system was used by the respondents in a different niche, each with differing requirements. As joked in another post, the Windows servers might have been in the niche of "servers which nobody uses/wants to use".
But I'm just responding to a trollish survey, exactly what they want.
I've run a windows 2000 box, windows 2003 and linux box. Never crashed.
Only have to reboot them to install and test software updates(windows + linux machines).
For example... check apache does start if server reboots for any reason.
I can only think people having any kind of uptime problem on any of these systems are just misusing the server. Stupid administraters are the problem not the OS alot of the time.
Windows and Linux platforms are both extreamly stable, if you UNDERSTAND how they work and you have spent the money of QUALITY components (buy a dell and you are asking for trouble, all of my ones are custom made). Hardware faults cause alot more crashes than people realise.
Thank you - that pointed out that it's a Yankee/SunBelt survey.
SunBelt Software has always been dependant on Microsoft (through value adds to MS products) for revenue, so thier sponsorship of this survey casts it into a questionable light. I call this a fairly well disguised attempt at spreading marketing instead of a scientifically done survey.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Ok, point of fact, I used to be a web developer for a Microsoft vendor that had exzclusive contracts with them. As such I was FORCED to use Windows. Side by side comparison of good sys admins on both OS's would show that even Windows 2003 still has issues and that any update forces downtime unlike on Linux. In my current job, it's the Windows servers that crash, get wierd hiccups and viruses.
I call shenanigans!!
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Translation: "We don't know how to support Linux, so it's Linux's fault."
Managers (PHBs) don't blame the OS, the blame the SysAdmin.
Unfortunately, when the blame game starts, the best defense is still "we're using the industry leader", and it's why FUD is such an appropriate tag for this thread.
Did someone say "confirmation bias"?
When was uptime a factor in deciding whether an OS was better than the other? True uptime is one of the factors but not surely the decisive one. Security, how quick the patches are released for bugs and the stellar technical support should be the decisive factors in deciding the superiority of an OS. And taking all these factors, I feel tha t Linux comes way ahead of Windows.
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
Errr lack of documentation for linux & open source software?? Since when were there man pages in Windows? Using command /? barely provides enough info and --help or -h in Linux provides the same amount of info + you have the man pages! Personally I think the documentation in linux is better than that in Windows, especially if you include the community documentation (forums etc).
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
Linux (FC3) server: Uptime 62 days and counting after a power outage - Serves 10,000 web hits a day. Blocks 3-10,000 SSH login attempts per day. (damn script kiddies)
Windows (2003AS): 9 days, after having to reboot 3 times in four hours because of printer problems. Serves 10-20 FTP transfers per day, and running MailExchange for about 1,500 e-mails per day.
Yeah, looks like the article is dead on...
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
See for yourself:o soft.comx .com
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.micr
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.linu
I can easily clone a production server and walk it through the upgrade process
apt-get dist-upgrade
It is truly awesome. You can test and re-test the entire process every time they release a bug fix for any of the packages you'll be using. (Yeah, you can do it with gentoo, also.)
before someone tags this stupid?
Is it just me or have 30% to 40% of all articles been tagged "stupid"?
i love it how the huge, blaring, gaping hole in their 'docs' argument is a huge straw man covering up the truth: linux/OSS is, by point of actual fact and definition, *nothing but docs*.
..
.. but true 'unix ideology' requires that you grok code, and build your own system from scratch.
.. meh ..
[rant]
that is to say, linux is fully documented. if you can't deal with that fact, then you are not qualified to run linux. i mean, you have to have studied 'the docs' for Windows, and demonstrate mean feats of orientation around the hegemony of the Windows doctree, in order to be a 'qualified Microsoft professional', right? well with linux, you must manage your codebase, compile, build, and assemble your own system to be a 'true linux administrator'; this hand-out candy distro realm is only the *front-end* of pro strong-uptime linux/unix installs
in any comparison of 'distros' in this regard it is an un-fair attack on the Free and Open nature of Source, an aspect of Linux' operational strength, which is that you are required to grok the code because it is a good thing to do, in the F/OSS world.
no well-tuned linux box was birthed from a distro; all the good ones are hand-rolled.. in fact this sheer administrative power has been true of Unix forever. a true F/OSS linux install is: a) rock-solid, operating (as in actually being used), b) based entirely on source adminstered by the builder, and c) built by the builder for the job it needs to do.
distro's are a commercialization of the linux sphere; they are a valid way of organizing ones users
grok the code. its not that hard. its quite possible today to build an operating system for which all angles of its operation are documented; all it takes is for you to grok the code.
grok is not difficult, if you do it often enough.
[/rant]
that said, i haven't used windows, personally, in many years, so
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Ive been using Slackware since 1999. Version 3 or 4. Slackware is not a 'easy' linux to use for most people. Redhat, Debian, and many others tend to 'coat' their distributions with a GUI like gnome or KDE, that starts up with the system. Slackware is more hands on, do it all manually, yourself, type system. The installer is a very similar interface to FreeBSD's. Last time I used FreeBSD was version 2, so bear with me. UPtimes on our Slackware boxen range from 60 days to 4 years, depending on how often a drive or fan goes out. One is still humming away on a Pentium II, and hasn't been restrarted but 3 times since it was bought. Once we had a major software problem, which has only happened once since 2001. It was PDF converter written in PHP, that went haywire, and we had to switch it to RN LVL 1, then init back to 3 to fix it. No reboot needed.
I find their Windows claims to be lies. Windows needs to be rebooted to apply updates in most cases. If they update their machines, then their uptimes are flat out lies.
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
I am not surprised. Documentation of many open source projects (including linux) is often very poorly written and/or not maintained. Being a good code writer does not necessarily translate into being a good documentation writer. Major software companies hire whole teams of doc writers, and the results are (many times) much better than those that come with OS projects. This has been one of my fundamental points in the never ending discussion of things that are hindering wide spread adoption of OS solutions.
My
From the fine article:
"nearly 20 percent more annual uptime."
Can't possibly be. At least for any server I control, a 20% INCREASE in uptime is impossible. This implies 80% availability OR LESS for the RHEL box; no more is mathematically possible.
I would throw out RHEL if it performed that badly! That would be, what, around a day outage every week? I would have the hardware diagnosed as well...
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Bye Bye Anonymous Coward. I guess we are now losing the most prolific commentor Slashdot has ever seen. The place just won't be the same without Anonymous Coward's wisdom, wit, humor, and twisted points of view.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Debian Sarge x86: 63 days, 19:43
Debian Sarge PPC: 61 days, 12 min
OS X 10.4 PPC: 51 days, 1:02
NetBSD m68k: 107 days, 37 mins
So, if you want the highest uptime, use NetBSD on a 25MHz 68040. Further, I contend that my study is at least as believable as the article cited in the submission.
MacBook Pro. Worst name since the Bicycle
How can a Windows XP Pro box be up for a year unless you're not applying the patches? I know there's at least been a handful of patches for XP in that time that require a reboot to take effect.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
...that I can see off the bat.
I personally manage 10 servers, 3 of which are windows, the rest various incarnations of Red Hat (7.2, 9, EL4, FC1+2). Our windows servers over the last month have 99.99%, 100% and 100% uptime, the co-lo linux boxes in a datacentre in London have 100% over the last month. The RH 7.2 and 9 boxes with cheap server rental places (1&1 & EV1) have around 99.8% uptime - not that you can draw much from that as it's a statistically miniscule sampling.
It comes down more to competent admins and decency of hardware rather than the platform these days.
I am NaN
Five of my servers recently turned over their uptime clocks. That means they have been up over 500 days. I no longer measure my Linux uptime in 'Annual' increments - have to go by decades now.
Find coupons in Greeley
Here come all the claims about how Microsoft somehow cheated in this comparison.
Next, you'll be telling me that Republicans stole the elections.
Can't you ever just accept the results of a fair and unbiased contest?
And give Statitics on reasons why the server went down, and stayed down longer then the other.
Is it due to Administrative Training. Say they changed networks and the Admin didn't know how to change the IP Addresses for Linux in Run Time.
Are they doing software development as Root on the Linux box causing it to blow up with their Beta Software.
What is the Load of the two systems. My best guess is that for Most Cases the Linux Box is used for Web Services on the Internet, and the Win3k Were used for the internal stuff.
Age of Hardware is Linux running on older hardware then W2k3
I am willing to take the statitic that Windows 2k3 can have better uptime on the average of a Linux box but I would like to know the details so Linux can improve itself. Just saying I am better then you just does't help make the other better.
Linux has helped Windows become a much more robust system. It stoped Microsoft from being so passive about its quality and working harder to make their product comptitive. But Linux developers should stop patting themselves on the back saying how good we are and work to improve Linux in the areas where it may fall behind, even if it may be the more booring part of coding.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I happen to be a Linux developer myself, and other than my own inherent bias towards my own system, I'd have to say that there are a few good reasons I never believe this junk:
Uptime isn't everything, especially as far as security patches are concerned. Sure, the site can run for years on end, but does it have the latest security fixes, especially for low-level kernel and other system stuff that often requires a reboot to finish?
The distribution does matter, at least in my own opinion. Red Hat might be one of the big names, but it's only one of many distributions – and a lot of them, especially ones based on Slackware Linux such as my own, tend to be considerably more stable and reliable (I may be wrong here, but I've used both systems, so I have at least some experience). So don't blame every Linux system just for Red Hat's problems.
History repeats itself, as a lot of previous posts have shown – they always make these extraordinary claims about Windows vs. Linux, but it's always the same people, and they're always proved wrong in the end. Since everyone else has already made this point, I'm just going to leave this one alone, and continue to the next:
UPTIME ISN'T EVERYTHING! I've already said it once, but uptime is only one of many different statistics as far as this type of thing's concerned. Sure, it's important that servers stay running as long as possible, but honestly, there are other important factors to consider as well – I'd rather have a Linux system that's occassionally offline than a Windows one that's always on, because (a) the Linux system would likely do what I need it to with far less work, at least in my opinion; (b) the Linux system would likely be much more secure against outside threats than the Windows one; and (c) face it, I'm biased, and so's everyone else who does this type of thing.
Just remember, there are three types of lies: Lies, damn lies, and statistics. I don't think we really need to say anything else. Q.E.D.
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
I wrote a Microsoft-funded white paper last year with the assistance of two subject matter experts - a Microsoft expert and a linux expert, both certified veterans of their fields. The goal was to compare the processes required to set up and administer various services in Windows 2003 Enterprise vs. Red Hat's and SuSE's boxed enterprise server NOSes. Because the white paper was intended for internal use only, we had 100% control over what services would be tested, how to evaluate them, and how to present our findings. We didn't evaluate uptime per se, but I feel my comments are relevant since installation and maintenance contribute to server and client downtime, ergo, uptime.
We compared many factors including user management, authentication, "ghosting" new machines remotely, remote application installs, file sharing, delegating authority to subordinate administrators, and much much more. The Windows and Linux guys would work on a "lab" side by side, often peeking over to see how the other was doing. At the end of each lab we'd all have a discussion about the number of steps, any problems, company and community support, the ease/frustration factor, and how it went overall. We wrote about all these factors and rated them on 10-point scales per lab, and condensed those into one comprehensive graph showing overall ease-of-use of each NOS.
Long story short, Windows came out on top by a huge margin in every field - ease, usability, intuitiveness, support, everything. In fact, the only topic where Linux came even close to Windows was in community support, and even that was only 50% of Windows' score. At the end of the project the Linux expert garnered a lot of respect for Windows and quashed most of his prejudices. Needless to say, MS soon compiled our white paper into marketing materials and stuck them on http://www.microsoft.com/getthefacts (but it's been replaced by more recent studies).
I was a little disappointed that we couldn't expand the scope of the test to put stuff like Apache and Squid and mySQL through the paces, but the topic was enterprise administration, not publishing live services. I also would have liked to have tested custom installs of other linux flavours like Debian or Slackware, but neither product had a specific enterprise distribution.
So don't be too quick to label all pro-Windows studies BS or FUD or other ignorant catch-all acronyms. I personally was funded by MS to spearhead an impartial study, and MS management had a genuine interest in improving their products. I can't speak for the study in TFA, but my own was conducted with nothing but integrity and truthfulness.
Well, my server can kick your server's ass!
This article is nothing more the flamebait.
It's probably more a case of Linux just happening to go down during the hours when most of the people on IRC's #linuxnewbiehelp channel are asleep, or out hunting for a real Linux job that doesn't require an MCSE.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I run RHL 8, and I have absolutely no uptime issues.
I mean really, I think you can go so
.
.
.
FATAL HTTP ERROR: [Connection to client lost]
throw new NoSignatureException();
I just applied for a press pass soI can read the whole thing. According to their numbers, the Windows boxes were down about 10-15 hours a year, while Linux was down 19. I agree documentation is not as good, and my initial impression is that this means the Linux boxes are down because the administrators don't know how to use them. They do stress in the overview that these numbers are dependent on your own shop however, and vary from one organization to another. This means the data is not consistent. Small shops with one or two men who really know Linux can do some amazing stuff; large shops with many people of many different skill sets do better with distros because more people can work with them. I've been trying to make up my mind on whether to advise people "Linux" or "Windows." This reinforces my present state: It depends.
Okay, so it stays up longer? It's dependable... but I bet less data was stolen from the Linux server.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
It's probably more a case of MCSEs that don't grok the concepts of Linux and how it is documented. The survey was supposedly limited to just shops that run both Windows and Linux. That means you are likely dealing with a bunch of MCSEs that have been working with Windows for over a decade and have only in the past couple years been given Linux to also administer. If such a survey were limited to shops that had been running both systems for an equal period of time and have people on staff who are specialists in each system and have equivalent levels of experience (for example the Windows admin has 10 years Windows experience and the Linux admin has 10 years Linux experience and both have been working at this particular shop for 4 years, which has been running both Windows and Linux for the past 6 years), then I think it might be able to show the true differences and similarities. But I don't think this is anything Ms. Didio is capable of doing.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I don't give a rip about uptime per se. What I care about is being able to reboot on my terms..and sadly...Windows usualy sets those terms.
]# uptime
09:55:37 up 396 days, 20:32, 1 user, load average: 0.04, 0.12, 0.17
But yet our windows servers must be rebooted about every 30 days. Thank you patch Tuesday.
I think that pretty much says it all, really.
What kinds of documentation did they require that they couldn't find?
*sigh* back to work...
no so fast. It's not like this is a monolithic documentation issue. quick! how many distros exist and how many open source apps are there? and how many of either are lacking documentation? Now add those together and divide by the number of overly critical people and number crap studies from puppet organizations and you will get 42. Don't bother to check my math -Numbers don't lie. Windows provides you with the clicky interface and whatever you are willing to pay for. Linux is "free" you are only limited by the time and energy you are willing to "spend" to learn to run it. My time and energy are very expensive - so it's not really free. The misconception that needs to be corrected is right there. The "Linux" community has never purported to provide that level of support - that there is any support or any open source apps is a testament to strength of the community. The expectation has become that the open source community should carry all these sorry asses and in exchange for what? a bunch of zombies? This idea needs to be re-evaluted. Documentation? I don't need no stinkin' Documentation! RTFM... that's what I did.
Just look at my uptime:
12:49:09 up 174 days, 13:39, 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.02, 0.00
The box was only down when I wanted to reorganize my lab area in the basement. this box functions as my IMAP/WEB/SMTP/BOOTP/NAT
server and is very dependable. My other Linux box is used for software development, and searching the net for stuff, that box is a desktop (ShuttlePC fully loaded0 so it's down when I am not on it. My New Linux box is, actually I am putting it together now, is
a Dual Core PowerMac G5 with 2.5GB RAM and 480GB of HD space. The support development with mac on Linux and Linux on Mac has been slacking latley so I'm building up a box to hopefully get mac on Linux working on a G5 dual core with Tiger, and running Tiger on Linux. Also the I can't wait till the G5 port of XEN is complete!
Don't trust a report like this. They had lame ass reasons. It's FUD.
The truth is when Vista is all that's comming from Microsoft, then more users will defect to Linux and OS/X.
Well, you show me a Windows box that is REBOOT in 60secs with all services. In XP at least, they try to trick the user into thinking the system us up (you can login) but it's not usable or all services are not started for some time after. As someone else here pointed out in their sig, anyone with more then 30 days uptime in windows isn't applying patches. I happen to have tons of those HP DL380s G4, and they POST around 45 seconds, that doesn't include OS bootup. Just to add drives to the raid array, scan the SCSI BUS, etc. And for the record, I used to be a MSCP in Windows NT 4, back in the day, and registered beta tested 95 - 2000, .NET, SMS, Visual Studio and many of their other products. That's when I got tired of all the bugs, hidden crap, re-installs, etc.
And I actually started using Linux (Slackware) over 10 years ago as well. As time went on, I saw MS products get more bloated, slower, have more bugs, while Linux and OSS just got better.
Everyone can have their opinion, as most people do. I've used both for many years, and from now on, my server will always be Linux.
I know that zealots from both sides will indulge in the opportunity for some bashing and grandstanding, which is fun and I enjoy a good smack-down as much as the next Slashdotter, but I just wanted to inject a little reality check. This study doesn't mean anything about OS quality. Numbers always lie, and even if you're not trying to make them lie, they're sometimes useless anyway, as in this case.
Linux has a different user base than Windows and UNIX. So the fact that 20% of the responses to the survey show higher Windows uptime doesn't mean that for the same usage patterns Windows is higher quality. To show that, you'd need to compare only sites with very narrowly targeted usage patterns which differ (as much as possible) only by their choice of operating system. This study didn't even attempt that, so making any claim whatsoever about the relative quality of operating systems based on this data is fallacious.
Instead, this study CAN shed some insight on the type of people running different OS's, and their type of usage.
Since UNIX had the highest uptimes, you might conjecture that conservative people run UNIX. Or you might guess that since UNIX market share is currently eroding in favor of Linux and Windows servers, UNIX servers are more heavily weighted towards older, established systems that aren't in early development stages as much as the up-and-coming OS's.
Conversely, since Linux had the lowest uptime, you might guess that Linux has a higher percentage of fresh new applications running on it.
(Note that I'm not saying that there's conclusive evidence of these guesses here. I'm just saying that when considered together with other data, these are the kinds of conclusions you'd be able to draw from this sort of statistic).
There's absolutely no way the Yankee group can claim to be unbiased if they allowed the Didiot within fifteen hundred meters of a report on Open Source or Linux.
http://unxmaal.com
Good ol' Yankee Group. At least they're consistent.
I knew who conducted the study before I even clicked on the "Live Bookmark" link in Firefox.
Honestly, is there any OTHER group out there that has published a study with the same conclusion? Or is Laura DiDio really the only one living in this MS-funded fantasy world?
Since when was Linux in its own little section? As far as I remember Unix is Linux and Foldoc seems to agree with me. Couldn't they just have said the few other variants instead of Linux and Unix Variants? Makes it seem like Linux is its own.
"Linux distributions .. are offline more [because of] the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation"
.. "That's not a place I want to be." - Laura DiDio Aug 2003
Even assuming that were true how does a lack of paper cause an OS to bork?
And how does a lack of paper cause the OS to stay offline longer?
Is it because it is sulking?
How was the data collect the data?
What was the methodology used?
Where are the figures?
What criteria was used in selecting the participents?
How is a marketing firm or Ms. DiDio for that matter, suitably qualified to comment on OS security? Finally are these people really the unbiased commentators they claim?
"Windows servers recover 30% faster from security attacks than Linux servers" Laura DiDio July 2005
"Indemnification is a serious, potentially costly issue for enterprises" - Laura DiDio Oct 2004
"For the time being, she said, Linux has an apparent advantage simply by virtue of a lower level of connectivity" - Laura DiDio April 2004
"hype notwithstanding, Linux's technical merits while first-rate, are equivalent but not superior to Unix and Windows Server 2003," - Laura DiDio Mar 2004
"This has the potential to turn into a twentieth century witch hunt," "There is a visceral anti-Microsoft sentiment in Europe." - Laura DiDio Sep 2003
"The entire Linux community is saying to customers, 'You're on your own,'"
davecb5620@gmail.com
I remember when I started running linux, I noticed that a lot of my geeky friends had tried and then gave up, going back to Windows. They all said something along the lines of "linux sucks, it doesn't work." These were people who had absolutely no idea how to run unix, let alone linux.
The results of the survey stand, but my interpretation differs from that of the Yankee group (and with a name like that, who wants to agree with them?). It's not so much scarcity of documention (it's there, trust me), but the scarcity of people who actually know how to manage linux servers. Windows sysadmins are a dimea dozen--they probably turn out thousands of them every year. The unices also have their fair share of support, but they're patently different from gnu/linux.
Surprisingly, Red Hat Enterprise Linux standard distribution users reported said they experienced 900 minutes of outage per server, per year.
Oh, pl-ease. 900 minutes? That's 15 hours. If it's a software problem why were they trying to run it on an unsupported OS? Operator stupidity doesn't count against uptime. If it was hardware related I could build a new server from parts and re-image in less than four hours, depending on traffic getting back from the computer store. Less if the parts are already on the shelf. What were they doing the other 11 hours?
Or maybe I don't want to know...
Either way it's total fucking PR blather.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Google is where we all go for answers these days.
I think it's interesting that MS sells a lot of software (Office, for example) that has less-than-great documentation, and that this is also a complaint people have with OSS. Currently there's a market for commercial documentation for both types of software--my local Borders has lots of books on both Linux and Windows Server. But eventually I expect that OSS documentation will improve to the point where it's better than what is provided in proprietary software, since there are people both willing and able to contribute to the documentation effort in OSS.
True story: I was once offered a full-time job where the owner of the company essentially told me he was looking to hire a Microsoft Office expert to provide office suite "consulting" to his staff. I didn't take it (as a technical writer, I want to actually write) but it said a lot about the state of usability and documentation for Office.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I ran a couple of HP servers (IA64) for a couple of years, one with Windows Server 2003, one with RHEL Linux. They both worked well, but the Windows machine required fewer reboots and was more stable. Remember that Windows Server 2003 is NOT XP, it was designed for uptime and can add patches on the fly without downtime. There are a lot of big IA64 servers out there running Windows Server 2003, especially at large telecoms, where uptime is paramount, and they do the job.
Mod the Article itself as Flamebait?
Others have already commented on the lack of clarity, the need to read between the lines, the absence of the most elementary numbers and facts about this "study" (as in: how many respondents, how recruited, how many rejected and why, how was uptime defined and measured, what were the uptime numbers, (contingency table by OS this year, contingency table by OS previous year)).
If any students read this, let me take this opportunity to warn you. Submit a "report" like this to any serious faculty and look forward to an F grade. Unless you're a "Communications Major" obviously, in which case you'll be complimented on the flow of your prose.).
I'm guessing here of course, but I think that the real study was conducted and written by someone totally different, and miss Didio got the write the "teaser": i.e. the part that you can release without divulging any real information that you would otherwise be required to pay for.
Yes, it was the sound of millions of collective heads exploding.
Raise your hand if you have read any documentation included with any software you purchased in the past five years. Anyone? Anyone?
Okay then- raise your hand if you know that there are 600-odd page gorilla Linux reference books out there which may provide documentation should you need it that will be 100x better than anything included with the software.
Raise your hand if you know where to seek help, such as #linuxhelp and #linux on EFNet.
Case in point. Why not put a properly run linux server against a properly run Windows server- that is what it comes down to. A trained, professional, and experienced admin who has learnt the software they are running and know it well, in a specific purpose. Put Linux as a fileserver against Windows as a fileserver with any optimizations possible and equivalent configurations that are agreed upon beforehand. Put Linux versus Windows as a Web server with a knowledgable admin. This `good at neither` system doesn`t work!
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Don't think anyone's mentioned this yet...
I know of some linux boxes that are amazingly reliable. I've owned three or four at least and on a couple of them I've had up times exceeding one year. No fuss, no muss.
The box? TiVo. ymmv
Two servers, names changed, both behind firewalls, both "less important" and "less exposed" (because EVERY *important* Internet-exposed server is going to be patched regulary, right?)
Windows 2000:
C:\uptime
\\SERVERNAME has been up for: 132 day(s), 22 hour(s), 48 minute(s), 12 second(s)
Linux (Slackware 9.1):
SERVERNAME:~: uptime
13:19:51 up 218 days, 20:53, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
See, you can get good runtimes on anything when the conditions are right...
Did I prove anything? Nah...
I want to know what exactly "unix" means to these people.
And I don't want to read the article.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
As Mark Twain famously noted: "There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics."
Please ignore further deceptive and misleading analytical techniques such as these and pay attention only to hard, raw data.
Ah, more of "he said", "she said". Who cares?
Look, the bottom line is not what is said; it isn't even what is true (except as it relates to the next statement); what matters is who can be most successful using a particular product. These hollow wars about uptime, reliability, etc, etc, are merely a reflection of that. In the end, those who can keep their systems on-line and available more will be more successful.
I monitor black hats and their sites all the time. It is the best way to catch new vulnerabilities before they become my problem. Many, many of them run music, video and software exchange sites on other people's systems that they have hacked. With very few exceptions, they are Windows Server machines. A very common practice is to use an array of vulnerabilities to compromise the system and, once they have control, to update and secure the system so that no one else can yank it away from them! Any Windows systems that can boast of long uptimes may be doing so only because of the efforts of black hats they aren't even aware of. Is that really anything to boast of?
A vast number of Windows site administrators are donating their bandwidth, storage space and CPU cycles to black hats without even being aware of it. A much, much smaller number of Linux and Unix administrators are doing so. 'nuff said!
0.9 * 0.2 = 0.18, not 0.018.
Yes, i know, those who don't watch Showtime won't get it.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
How do you know it's an obvious fabrication? Is that just more jumping to conclusions? If the report said Linux has "20% more uptime" than Windows. I'm sure not one person here would be waving the FUD flag, just more slamming of Microsoft... hell I'd even put money on that bet.
As for the TCO question, per client? Well we have 7 unix admins for 75 servers in total (A mix of Solaris, some IBM crap and Linux) and 12 FTE and 3 Contractors to support all our Windows servers... Windows wins that one again.
"Windows Server 2003 was recently compared against Linux and Unix variants in a survey by the Yankee Group, with Windows having a higher annual uptime than Linux.
Also...
Pope says Catholicism the best religion and Bin Laden says Bush is a bad, bad man
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
I bet they didn't survey any Linux Gurus. Linux is a hobby for some and a business tool for others. Both groups have no motivation to produce documentation. If you want documentation, hire someone to write it. And give back to the community.
They said it folks! Their reason is because of poor documentation in Linux! The converse of this is that those server admins don't know enough about Linux to be administrating a Linux machine. End of story. Seriously, how long does it take to read a two page man file? The point I'm trying to make is that Linux is more stable and WILL give you more uptime, if you only know how to use it. Windows gives people a "pretty good" uptime and "average" stability if you don't care to learn much about server administration.
Actually, I believe you. Having tried pretty much every major Linux distribution, I have to say that the commercial distributions really suck shit in those areas.
Take installing software, for example. RedHat and SuSE are only now finally getting a clue and supporting something like APT. SLES 9 was so crap I ended up writing my own tools to index the RPMs available on the repository and let me grep for the ones I needed, and feed the URLs to ncftpget.
Or installing the OS. I'm running OpenSuSE on a server because SLES wouldn't install properly, the X drivers for S3 were broken I think, X just went into an infinite loop when the machine tried to boot.
Or documentation. Type man yast or man yast2 on SLES, and you used to get "No manual entry for yast2", now you get a useless 1-page summary of how to change the widget style or use it as a replacement for rpm -i. RedHat's just as bad, last time I had the misfortune of running RHEL none of their add-on utilities had man pages.
As for intuitiveness, no computer is intuitive, so obviously Windows will win there because it's what most people are used to.
I find it really interesting that the commercial "enterprise" distributions are so much worse than the free ones. I could understand if they were no better, but my experience is that the commercial distributions provide a massive value subtract. You'd think they could at least be as up-to-date, easy to admin and well documented as the infamously slow-to-release Debian.
[Opinions mine, very definitely not IBM's.]
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
You haven't really touched a Windows box in almost 8 years?
.9. It was a HELL of a lot smaller install (hell it fit on 4 floppy disks if I remember correctly).
I remember using Slack way back in
I got tired of the constant distribution battles, the various software incompatablities between distributions, and dealing with elitist attitudes of people that think they know all about Windows based on knowledge gleaned almost a decade ago...
Yes, Windows is better documented... That is, if you are looking for really shallow documentation. For both Linux and Windows, you are way better off by buying a few good books. The GUI documentation of Linux is pretty worryingly bad, but if you go deeper, it gets better. With Windows, it's just the other way around. Even MSDN is pretty bad and (maybe more importantly) one sided. And, if you are trying to watch it on the machine you are working on, prepare for a reboot; MSDN requires the latest Internet Explorer most of the time. I do not expect .NET to improve this situation, with Java application servers you can just unzip the stuff in a folder and run (as with the VM).
ive been running my debian linux server with like 99.99999% uptime for almost 6 years now
that whole survey is stupid, who runs both windows and linux servers? who would need to run two, obviously one would be neglected
I generally find that whenever Linux is being attacked, it is only through a model with serious logical fallacies that are carefully covered over by seemingly innocent mistakes. In reality these are carefully engineered FUDs designed to sound valid to most common people but failing under any serious scrutiny.
I can conclude from these quotes that the author may feel that Window's point and click interface should somehow justify its inefficiencies compared to Linux. However, Linux's lack of point-and-click gui tools is very old news that got washed away several years ago when tools like Mandrake's free setup tools for Red Hat and SuSE's YAST came about. And besides, it is better to have to learn to setup systems using text config files and then have it run problem free for a year, than to point and click for a day and end up with a system that needs constant attention just to be kept running.
Take this! 12:11:24 up 5805095 days, 21:43, 64000 users, load average: 0.24, 0.25, 0.24 BAM!
-Those who know do not say, Those who say do not know
If something requires me to read, it needs to be re-designed.
"Why is our server down?"
"Well, I was sitting in front of it TESTING OUR INTERNET CONNECTIVITY..."
I think that you are missing the point of many people's objections to this
and other published technical opinions.
Why would anyone trust your opinion about anything when
you freely admit that Microsoft bought your opinion ?
Why do Linux-distributions (both so-called "Enterprise" and the "Home-Users"'s) refuse to produce any kind of sensible documentation?
Neither RHEL nor SLES ship with man-pages for the various device-drivers that come with the kernel.
Just compare this to a FreeBSD or OpenBSD system, where every single device-driver also has a decent man-page that actually does make sense.
Don't talk about TLDP - most of the stuff is hilariously out-of-date - but as APIs and ABIs are unstable by design, it's no surprise nobody is going the extra mile of actually documenting the stuff he wrote.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
So, how exactly would documentation make a machine fail? This report must have been written by someone from the 'Duh' department...
Oh well, what the hell...
So what if they're talking about unscheduled downtime... If you have to apply a patch every week (ala windows) then that's unscheduled downtime....
I work for a tiny hosting company that uses off-the shelf lowend hardware with linux. These boxes tend to have random hardware failures (power supplies, hard drives, etc) on occassion. Since the web sites are usually not "enterprise level" we can get away with a couple hours down time to swap out a part without causing too much of an uproar.
Overall the service is not bad, and overhead is low, and the clients are happy (we don't advertise the specs of the machines and claim them to be something they are not). For the most part this strategy has been good, I think out of 20 servers we replaced 2 failed power supplies in te last year and one faulty network card. The down time for the clients was about an hour because the servers were at a datacenter and we needed to get someone out there.
Anyway, the point is Linux servers run on a much wider range of hardware, and I would guess that there is a lot more low-end linux boxes out there. It seems any study should include the server platform into the equation when making reliability claims.
I want to see how they evaluted uptime.
I find this extremely difficult to believe. I smell something fishy.
At a minimum, reboots for patches give Linux servers an edge.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Okay, I will admit that this Didio person is obviously a corporate shill with an agenda. And I will go on the record as a Linux fan, infact I am running Ubuntu right this moment.
However, I do take some exceptions to Linux. I understand that slashdot is a haven for Linux and Mac users, but Linux can not ultimately flourish in a free market. I agree with that. Money is a fuel that companies use to power their company. Money comes in, which allows you to hire better employees, who put out a better product, which in turn creates more revenue, which is then used to purchase even better employees, who then turn out an even better product, etc. That is just simply how it works, and you can't change that.
Linux replaces money with "community" and the oppurtunity to learn. It's a grand idea, if not more than a little hippie-ish. I am pleasantly suprised with the latest distro of Ubuntu, but I can't help but wonder how much better it would be if people were actually getting paid to do nothing but work on Linux. Linux is a great learning tool for people to dive right in and to expand their programming knowledge. OSS allows any would be programmer to learn more about OS, applications, networking, drivers, etc.. Linux is an awesome learning tool, and I can tell that people are getting much better at it. Linux will always be around, but it lacks the proper "feul" to really elevate it to something greater.
As a manager, Ihad to make a decison about Windows vs. Linux. We chose to go with Linux because we found some college students who were familiar with it, for cheap. And Linux is renowned for its uptime and interoperability with other applications. However, you have to weigh "uptime" versus the lack of Linux skills in the general population. Could I easily find myself in a position where there is only one Linux Admin in the area who wants 3x as much as an MCSE? Of course I can. On the oppossite end, I run over at least 3 MCSE's every morning who would work for peanuts. You can't just look at uptime. You have to look at the cost of that uptime. If you are spending 3x as much to keep your Linux box up, then that isn't a smart business decision. Remember, business isn't about technology, it is about money. Having an admin who is sitting around waiting for someone to respond to a message board, so that we can get our server back up is ridiulous. And yet, it has happend to us several times since going with Linux. In contrast, some other servers that are still running Windows Server, haven't had a problem in over a year.
For the record, I've been using linux on servers and for my desktop for years.
Documentation for big projects (apache, squid, etc) is usually easy to find. However, when you start running between versions and other isssues, suddenly the waters become a bit murky. Google is often friendly, but lately I've been lucky to find docs in english let along for the version(s) of software I'm using.
I've also been taking my LPI (my employer's idea). It's a freaking linux certification/exam and has no official documentation, other than a general overview of topics. That's right, no course materials, nothing. Even as an experienced linux user/admin I generally don't memorize the dozen different ways to do something, and then find that the one I didn't know is on the exam (which you can't study beforehand, because no documentation).
Sites like TLDP et al are very useful, but a more comprehensive set of documentation (and more up-to-date documentation coming with the software packages) would certainly be a useful thing.
Windows and Windows software are documented? When did that happen?
I admit that my Windows experience is desktop, not server, but I have always found Windows and Windows software documentation to be fragmentary and entirely too often dead flat wrong. Linux documentation leaves a lot to be desired also, but my take is that it is more comprehensive, less inaccurate, and ultimately source is available if (well, OK, when...) the documentation is too awful.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
FWIW, here's my current uptime champion:
sla ~ # uptime
11:06:38 up 587 days, 2:11, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00
The others are lower, primarily due to extended power failures, but the average (Amongst 16 servers) seems to be about a year. Compared to that, I have to reboot my windows servers at least once a month, if not for updates for clearing random "odd" behavior that crops up after awhile...
So yeah, yet another "report" that doesn't really prove anyhting.
On the Windows side of things, Win2k3 server performs the best, most outages due to forced reboots from patching/hot fixing. Win2k servers follow closely behind. Both are about .04% behind the Linux and HP-UX boxes for uptime, and much further behind when it comes to the CPU running at 100% for an extended period of time doing whatever Windows servers decide to do overnight (Nagios classified as 'unavailable').
This 'study' is utter dreck. It's flawed from the get-go, and people have to be careful believing what they read. If you are an IT professional, I highly recommend you speak with peers who have some serious experience with Linux before you proceed with any deployment/changeover/rollout. Depending on what your needs are, you might be pleasantly surprised!
On Windows it is impossible to delete or replace a file which is in use (e.g. a shared library). The same applies for directories. Thus for any meaningful upgrade you need to restart the applications and often the OS _before_ you can do anything with their files. There are complicated mechanisms for keeping track of files that need to be deleted/replaced after a reboot. It appears that recently they have added yet another even more complicated feature to avoid reboots: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1895276,00.as p
Such complicated techniques for a basic thing like an upgrade make me very nervous. What happens if something goes wrong with the extensive bookkeeping in the middle of the upgrade ?
Probably where all the spam I get is coming from.
"12:20pm up 714 day(s), 20:58"
We have quite a few servers with uptimes near or even greater than this. But then we expect it. We run many Solaris on SPARC servers.
Linux is present in our environment, but everything critical runs on Sun.
The report makes no sense until you realise it means the Linux guys had to write their own manuals. Obviously the Yankee Group denied them personal Internet access so the survey would be fair.
20 percent less annual uptime (about 70 days) is damn good, if you must document an operating system *and* get the servers back online. Windows lusers would take 10 times as long.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Slashdot Stats
time: 17:38:54
uptime: 485 days
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
There are always some study that says one OS is better than another. Most often the study is funded by one of the OS groups. That doesn't it necessarily make it useless. What makes them useless is when the details of the study are not released.
These studies present themselves as scientific but they are not. In true science, the data and the methodologies are presented for scrutiny. There could be issues with either or both that would harm the results. True science involves skepticism.
Remember a few years ago when some cult claimed that they cloned a human baby. The first reaction was "Can we see and test the baby's DNA?" When the answer was no, the majority of scientists dismissed their claims outright. The minority reserved judgement until there was actual proof.
Until I can look at the study, I'm not going to believe it. Since no one paid for the study, the Yankee Group does not have any restrictions unless they mean to profit by selling the study.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
And the 3 different OS's thing is definitely important. It may also be worth wondering what these different servers are doing. If the unix/linux/solaris/... servers are doing things that require lots of work but the windows servers are not doing anything complicated - or if they're all doing exactly the same thing and can be administered from a single machine, the evaluation gets way more complex.
For a second there I thought I had stepped into bizarro world with a title like that. Fortunately, with the summary I know I'm still at Slashdot.
There is no use. With no real information, this study is crap. It is just throwing more FUD on the pile. One of my favorite bits: I love that Linux is refered to as a less mature operating system. "Yankee Group determined a significant portion of this outage time is attributed to the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation compared to the more mature, established operating systems."
In some ways (support for 3D graphics HW, sound), Linux is not as developed as Windows or MAC, mostly due to proprietary vs open driver issues. In many other ways (portability, support for older/slower HW, virtualization, load sharing across machines, security, customization), Linux has far greater maturity.
UNIX is a totally different issue, but the Linux vs UNIX comparison is moot as far as I am concerned. For the most part, the kernels are the only fixed-in-stone aspects of these OS's. Some things don't exist in the Linux kernel, others don't exist in proprietary UNIX kernels. Choose your poison based on what you need.
In the end, the list of features unavailable in Linux is short and inconsequential when compared to the list of features unavailable in Windows or Sun/AIX/etc. OpenMosix, Xen, and User Mode Linux alone should be enough to overwhelm the Linux downside of making sure you buy a video card from a manufacturer who isn't an ass.
Just to round out my arguement: the other measure of maturity is time-based. Windows NT (follow-on from ideas developed in other versions of windows) was first released in July 1993. Linux (follow-on from ideas developed in UNIX and minix) was first released in August 1991.
Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html
Wow. It seems that I haven't seen a news post like this ever. Purposefully written to cause a flamewar. How retarded.
The assertions are ridiculous on the face of it, obviously prepared by someone with an agenda, and not even a bit subtle.
As an IT professional, I can tell you that if any of our linux servers were to go down, there would be people screaming bloody murder all over the place within a few moments. Downtime is unacceptable for infrastructure services, and linux has performed flawlessly for the fortune 100 company where I am employed.
I think as other posters have noted, the key piece of information that was unwittingly leaked, was that the survey was only open to windoze shops, and most likely included some mcse's linux test boxes in the downtime data figues. That's really the only thing that makes sense, as downtime simply wouldn't be tolerated in a normal production environment.
Anyone who is works with linux professionally and is aware of the fact that it's been running 24x7 for years at amazon.com and other firms such as my own employer, will find it quite odd to read about all this extended downtime and the nonsensical reasons given for it.
Let me get this straight.. Microsoft paid someone to say Unix beats their OS? Right..
Who really reads reports by the Yankee Group? They are obliviously a shill for Bill. Real systems people know that this is BULL. I had an old HP Netserver LH running RedHat 4 that ran uninterupted for over two years. It was our primary web and mail server. I only had to shut it down because the UPS batteries needed changing. Keeping Widows desktops running uninterupted for a whole day is a challenge. -OB
Is that a SCSI connector or are you just glad to see me?
Many big applications are not so tolerant of patches, hotfixes in general. If you are running an enterprise package that has to be available, a test server is very very necessary. Better to destroy the test server than the production machine with a non-removable hotfix.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
This is just pure FUD.
Uptime is something I see as completely meaningless, the longer the uptime just means the longer the machine wasn't rebooted that's all. Why would a sys admin reboot? After a major update or a new kernel or even after serious patches.
In the world of linux, there's constant improvements, enhancements and security patches in the kernel and in the server software. I think the gap is more to do with Linux Sys admins being more active in maintaining their boxes compared to the windows sys admins.
If windows 2K/2003 servers do have longer uptimes than that to me is just scary, it means those sys admins aren't applying security patches regularly.
My 2 cents.
"If a show of teeth is not enough, bite
I have read these moronic studies from both sides. All are flawed or will be perceived as flawed no matter who creates or sponsors them. The one thing that never seems to get posted is that the OS matters very little in a properly run data center. I have Windows boxes and Linux boxes that have run for a year with not even a reboot. I have had both fail at critical times that caused major issues. I have had to apply service packs that casued applications to be taken out of service with both and I have not applied certain packs and patches in favor of uptime with both. In the end it is the quality of the IT staff that makes the difference. My staff could run GE on a cluster of nintendo gameboys and a blackberry without missing a beat. When you have high uptimes the credit goes to the folks who maintain the systems, not anyones OS or hardware.
I swear I didn't know it was loaded...
Any IT departement really interested in HA has redundant servers anyway.
:-)
IMHO having downtime on a server is not so much important as before. Just as it isn't so important to hunt every little bit of optimisation nowadays.
Specially for you --- all Java/C# lovers
I have to reboot Windows2K3 jsut about everytime an update is avaliable from Microsoft. I started using the system only a few months ago.
I have not had a reboot of the Linux system we use here in well over a year, (448 days to be exact) even though I have updrad applications and applied many patches.
--fatboy
Since when did lack of documentation affect a computer's uptime??
Last I remembered, it was the responsibility of the SysAdmin to ensure a proper configuration that will ensure a long uptime. If vendors were accountable for this, Microsoft would get sued everytime a windows server crashes, which would basically make them bankrupt! =p
The only lack of documentation I see here, is a document which includes the actual results of this study.
How do they base these results? what a brainless piece of FUD this is. I smell Ballmer somewhere near by...
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
Computers running Windows are not servers. They are only gamming and desktop machines.
The admins were total fucking n00bs.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
I want one of those windows servers that can accumulate well over a year's worth of uptime in a year.
/me ducks and grins
No. Believe me. You don't.
And, I reserve the right to not be discriminated against by Linux zealots with a few mod points to prove something with. I get mod points too, and somehow I can manage to contain myself.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
According to various articles scattered around the net, the Unix flavors included Solaris, HP-UX, etc. But, I have seen no references to NetBSD or FreeBSD as a Unix that was evaluated.
While boxes are boxes and OSs are OSs, the application that the server is running needs to be factored in. There are many cases where a BSD server may be a better choice than Linux or Windows just as there are cases where Linux or Windows may be the better choice. I found it interesting that I can find no reference to a BSD Unix in any of the links to the study.
So, since this study has so many unanswered questions relating to function, measurement criteria (what is considered downtime?), application, hardware, etc., the survey is pretty much worthless.
Box+OS is a tool and I use the right tool for the job. One size does not fit all solutions.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
With Debian, grab deborphan and debfoster and you can weed out un-needed packages quickly and easily.
"deborphan" compares the dependencies of each package so you can see packages that are installed that nothing else needs. Delete the ones that you don't need.
"debfoster" shows what all the dependencies are for a particular app. For example, Apache can have all kinds of packages it is dependent upon. If you want to get rid of that app, you can also quickly purge all the packages that were installed as dependencies for that app.
Once you've got the machine stripped down to the basics, just check all the files in the non-home/non-data/non-log directories to make sure that they each belong to a package. Or that you know why you put them there.
It runs sweet.
It runs clean.
It runs exactly what you want.
Nothing more/nothing less.
Which makes patching the box soooooooooo much easier. And it means that you have fewer potential security holes because you're running fewer apps.
Correct me if I am wrong but does the EULA for Windows 2003 state that you must get permission from MSFT before publishing any kind of performance data on the operating system? Perhaps that only applied to for true performance benchmarking and uptime is not considered performance benchmarking in this case?
Kernel is updated, what, 10-20 times/year? Or don't you update your kernel? Update kernel is one (fast) reboot: at least 3-6 minutes ~~ 1-2 hours/year. Update (for instance) apache or mod_* can be instantaneous (few seconds), or something can go wrong and it'll be some hours. Obviously, big shops have failover, and you'll update one server at a time -- even with someone 10 hours down, the "total" downtime will be zero. Can you clarify, please?
:-)
One example: our (commercial, expensive) database is stopped everyday at 3am and stays one full hour down for backup (the online-backup product was too expensive). That's 365 hours/year downtime. Ok, so we don't use the database at 3am (thank $DEITY), but...
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
As far as TFM it's qualifications draw my suspision. Did they include "devices" running linux as well or just full blown rigs? I can tell you *nix based appliances (unless they're really bad) have very few problems, and don't typically require the constant reboots for system updates that drives down your 99.99..999999 uptime.
Whatever happened to limiting exploitable processes? Windows method of protecting the services is all based around their firewall. Ever try and configure a windows box to run slimmed down? It's a pain in the ass. How about hardened? Good luck, apply the NIST standard lockdown SecPol to a 2k3 box and you'll see what I mean.
Take a *BSD/Trustix(+SELINUX)/Debian(+SELINUX) box install with 3 services AND a firewall in a 100meg footprint, and call it a day. Windows can't compete with the kinda uptime you get out of a stripped down OS. Oh they try with XP-Embedded and the likes but it's certainly not within the same realm of ease to create and deploy the OS that the *nixes give you. Not to mention, how many times have you had to troubleshoot a problem in Windows that ended up being caused by some unrelated service? I can tell you from my experience, it doesn't happen very often on a machine running single digit numbers of services.
On top of which they nicely avoided shops smart enough not to run Windows devices in their nocs, who probably have much better trained staff on the unix hardware and would throw their numbers with nearly 0 downtime figures. How many untrained people new to unix reboot when they could have just restarted a service? etc. This whole thing smells fishy.
My apache box is wondering what this "downtime" they speak of is?
... along with a pointless reply. :-p
You probably should not read the DiDio-bashing going on over at Slashdot today, but I do see what I believe is an error in the presentation of the data in the press release http://www.yankeegroup.com/public/news_releases/ne ws_release_detail.jsp?ID=PressReleases/news.server reliabilitysurvey.DiDio.htm.
The specific statement, "with nearly 20% more annual uptime" is I believe factually not supported by your numbers. Do you mean that Windows has 20% LESS DOWNTIME than RHEL?
"on average, individual corporate Linux, Windows and Unix servers experience three to five failures per server per year, resulting in 10.0 to 19.5 hours of annual downtime for each server."
If RHEL had 19.5 hours of downtime, and WIndows had 15 hours of downtime, this would be 20% less downtime. 5 hours less downtime per year is actually real data and would be useful to the press release.
On the other hand, 20% more annual uptime would actually result in RHEL being down nearly 61 DAYS per year assuming Windows is up 100.000%.Note: 60.8333 days = 365 - (365/1.2)
----------- The report may be correct. The press release is most certainly in error.
Strike one. Laura DiDio: Strikes two and three. Not going to waste any more time on this.
Okay, it wasn't funded by the MS OS division. It was funded by the MS PR department. How disingenious...
Face facts people, research companies don't do research for free.
Nosing around the money trail behind this research leads directly into highly placed Microsoftian shit-holes.
I stand in awe of Laura D's nearly capacity to shovel bullshit with such a tiny maw.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Why was this piece of crap published, and why was it put on /.? It's 97% content-free. It asserts that Yankee group did a survey, and purports to tell us what some of the conclusions are. As mentioned by previous commenters, the statements cited (from the survey, in the article) are nonsense. There's also no mention of how to find the original report, or a clue as to the methods and procedures used, size of the sample, how measurements were made, or how they reached the conclusions.
It should also be mentioned that surveys are generally for getting a handle on opinions. If you want to determine facts, then you would typically run some controlled tests. Smells like a pile of horseshit to me.
Here's the entire article:
By Gregg Keizer
TechWeb.com Mon Jun 5, 8:21 PM ET
Windows 2003 Server is a more reliable server operating system than
Linux, a research firm said Monday.
ADVERTISEMENT
According to the Yankee Group's annual server reliability survey, only
Unix-based operating systems such as HP-UX and Sun Solaris 10 beat Windows on uptime. Windows 2003 Server, in fact, led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20 percent more annual uptime.
On a broader note, said Yankee analyst Laura DiDio, the major server operating systems all have a "high degree of reliability," and have showed marked improvement in the last 3 to 5 years.
On average, individual enterprise Windows, Linux, and Unix servers experienced 3 to 5 failures per server per year in 2005, generating 10 to 19.5 hours of annual downtime for each server.
But standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from "niche" open source vendors, are offline more and longer than either Windows or Unix competitors, the survey said. The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation.
The Yankee Group made a point of stressing that the survey was not sponsored or supported by any server OS maker.
Most people don't even think inside the box.
We've gotta standardize on spreadsheets guys!
Just about every month I have to restart due to patching - but lets allow 60 days in case one month the patches are don't need it.
From experience, may I strongly recommend a backup before pruning your home and data directories? I don't know how many times I've had the "oh shit" effect doing cleanup of that type...
-30-
I have a Linux box that's been running since 2002 providing basic services in an enterprise setting. Running non-stop that is.
And I'm not treating it like anything special. Give me an MS box that does the same for a week and I'll take it out for dinner.
define:fud
FUD is an abbreviation for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, a sales or marketing strategy of disseminating negative but vague or inaccurate information on a competitor's product. The term originated to describe misinformation tactics in the computer software industry and has since been used more broadly.
I think the argument could be made from both sides, until they are blue in the face. I think performance depends on what you are doing with the server, and how it is being used. I have a linux server with the sole responsibility of processing employee time punches, that has been running successfully for 3 years now without a single reboot. Another linux server runs several different tasks in our building, and has had to be rebooted 3 times this year due to a system lockup. And of course our Windows File server has been up and running for nearly 2 years now, without a reboot. Patches for all servers are considered carefully for all of our servers, and with our file server solely on our internal network, we haven't applied many patches at all. Again, I think it just depends on what your use is for the server.
is for people who have bought into the whole "10 hours is 99.999% availability, which is excellent" midnset.
You mean for people who can't calculate.
While five nines is pretty good, 10 hours is not:
365*24*60*(1-0.99999) ~= 5.26 minutes of downtime.
Ten hours down is really bad:
1-10/(365*24)~= 0.99886 = 99.886%
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
"Windows 2003 Server, in fact, led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20 percent more annual uptime."
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
why does slashdot even bother with these 'my e-cock is bigger than yours' stories? windows/bsd/linux/unix comparisons should just be left out of these geek based site. we all know what we like, and dont need some FUD trying to get us to switch to something most of us have tried, and couldnt stand, or are force to use at work, or because of a significant others lower IQ.
The only way that makes any sense is if it's been misread by someone who's lousy at maths but good at producing meaningless reports. Such as a "business analyst".
If you think of it as "20% less downtime", then every hour of downtime on Windows equates to 1 hour and 12 minutes on Linux.
Note they haven't defined "downtime". Some businesses don't include planned maintenance in downtime statistics, some do. Some may not include downtime out of hours (if they don't run 24x7), some may. So unless they've ensured that everyone is counting downtime the same way, the entire survey is completely meaningless from the off.
I often wonder why in my shop the Windows guys even bother. They have created scripts which are run weekly to defrag and reboot the Win2K3 Server machines. I asked our AIX administrator how often he defrags his machines. He just gave me the Spock eyebrow.
So what did we decide, the Linux servers were down for 3, 4 weeks compared to a *stellar* 100% uptime from Windows?
Who admins the Linux servers? I can tell you that two full days of downtime a month for my servers puts me in unemployment. Did they hire 10 year-olds or something? Were the servers REQUIRED to run super-unstable software? What gives?
I pay no attention to surveys like this one from the Yankee group.
Our Redhat file server was running 24x7 for 18 straight months until I had to shut it down to replace the network card and add another hard drive. Downtime was no more than two hours. It's been online 24x7 for almost 9 months since then.
We've got a pair of Redhat print servers that also run 24x7. Downtime on those for the last two years is no more than a few hours due to power failures (these machines are not plugged into UPS's).
The Redhat linux mail server we've got has no more than eight hours a year of downtime, the culprit on this seems to be mime-defang getting out of hand when spammers flood our mail server.
What about BSD, you insensitive clods?!?!
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Ladies and Get's
:= difference)
and the reason is....
"the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation"
Oh dear!
Well, let get things straight.
- Solaris is nearly as OpenSource as Linux. So, if there are less OpenSource docs, solaris would be affected as well, but solaris wins? => contradiction
- Linux and Unix aren't that different (apart from kernel issues). In fact if you take a linux distribution l_1 and a unix distribution u_1, you'll be able to find some linux distribution l_2 and some unix distribution u_2, that (d
d(l_1,u_1) contradiction.
- Looking at the kernel there is no big advantage in MS ones, that allows longer uptimes.
So, let's look behind the scenes.
- Companies, willing to afford HP or Sun servers, paying lots of money for Hardware and software know what they are doing. They usually have trained professionals, etc. => longer uptime.
- Companies, only willing to afford cheap intel boxes, are most likely unwilling to pay trained professionals, too => shorter uptime.
- Companies, unwilling to spent any money at all, will use cheap intel boxes, popular free (as in free beer) operating systems (mostly linux distro, because they've heart it's free) run by some guy, who just came around some time => maximum downtime.
- Because of M$'s desktop monopoly, untrained workers are able to fix window server problems faster than linux ones.
And the result? Do do surveys on that.
args.
The same with restarting the network services. In fact, I can upgrade both the ssh daemon and the networking services and even the shell I'm using, remotely, via an SSH connection and never lose my connection.
There is no downtime. None. All the active connections are maintained and all new connections get connected. There is not a single second during which the connections are dropped or refused.
Downtime just does not exist unless:
#1. I am physically moving the machine.
#2. I am loading a new kernel.
#3. I have a hardware failure.
Having just finished my statistics classes I wonder if the difference is significant and thus not caused by chance. I tried to get the report but cannot find it anywhere to examine this. Does anyone have any insight in the methodology and statistical analysis used?
Microsoft Windows is a hard OS to administer without training. It's not something you can just dive into, and a lot of admins get it shoved on them because upper management decides on a software package that requires it. The result? Downtime because the admin is unfamiliar with Windows and doesn't know where to find the answers.
I personally can find the answers for any problem with a dozen operating systems faster than I can find the answer to a Windows 2003 problem. That's because we don't use Windows servers very much (it's too expensive for my budget, particularly in hardware terms) so my staff has relatively little experience in it.
A successful business should seek out people that can make shit work and then give those people a budget that will allow them to meet the business's needs. Operating systems matter far less than people - let them use whatever they want! If you chose the right people, you will succeed, if not, the operating system will not be what killed you.
Incidentally, I have a dozen or so mission-critical Red Hat servers that've been running since 2003 with no unscheduled downtime (we do reboot them for kernel security patches, but those are scheduled in advance). I wish I could say that about our memory-leaking windows servers... or our HP-UX servers, for that matter. The Suns have been pretty bulletproof, but they have very little workload compared to any of the others.
I agree that Linux (and open source in general) suffers on the documentation front, and onerously suffers at that. Except it doesn't matter as much. Some parts of Linux are amazingly well documented while others are completely without documentation of any sort (short of reading the source.. which is sort of like trying to figure topography by looking at all the tree leaves in the forest).
Having fixed both Windows and Linux boxen when they went and did something stupid to themselves, I can say from experience that fixing Linux is easier and faster, even without the documents. For the sorts of problems I've fixed, it boiled down to the use of flat ASCII files to store configuration in. Even without docs, I can examine other Linux boxes or just plain experiment until I figure out what the system did to it's configuration files and how to fix it. With windows, it's the same thing, except it's all hidden in the registry, which is poorly documented, opaque and doesn't leave itself easily open to comparison and experimentation (read: backing up and restoring from the backup when some change made the system totally unuseable). Worst Lin problem I've fixed took me 2-3 evenings. Worst windows problem I've fixed took >5 evenings. Count of problems, about equal.
What do most people do when faced with the really hard to fix Windows problems? They do as MS suggests and reinstall Windows. For Linux? It seems they get on the net and ask around until they A) find and answer, and B) leave an electronic trail in the process for others with similar problems to find.
So this lack of docs stuff is total crap. Really what they've compared is the amount of time it takes to fix Linux without docs, to the amount of time it takes to reinstall Windows (and in the process, loose all your apps, configuration, etc). Take away the reinstall crutch and Windows is far worse than Linux.
From experience, may I strongly recommend a backup before pruning your home and data directories? I don't know how many times I've had the "oh shit" effect doing cleanup of that type...
I've decided that I'm just not doing it any more, except on my laptop, and I rsync everything from there to my file server on a regular basis so I know I can't lose anything. Disk space is cheap enough, and grows rapidly enough, that I don't think pruning is worth either the time or the risk.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I've decided to take Linus' advice and back up everything by posting it on the net :-)
Seriously though, I've gone through the "oh shit" effect often enough that I double-check every deletion beforehand, and I usually have an image of the partition floating around "just in case".
I had originally done all the calculations, for 5 minutes, 10 hours, 20 hours, plus associated comments, and decided after looking at them that I was being a bit anal ... so I deleted a lot of it (guess I should have hit preview one more time, but the new css on slashdot makes my eyes bleed :-)
I don't see how any Windows machine could have an uptime of longer than a month if you have to reboot after every update. Unless you're not updating.
a pro, trained guy came to set up win2003 server for our firm. Not my decision, not my branch. That was for Accounting, I'm in Production. But I just watched him creating user accounts.
/etc/group /etc/passwd
Click "New." Type username from the sheet of paper. Type default password. Click groups. Click 4-5 groups on the list, each time changing the privledges. And of course earlier hour of creating such groups. And so on. Change some defaults in settings for the 50th time for 50th account created. Assign the same home directory path other than suggested by system, pasting it from clipboard. Creating one account was like 15 minutes.
I just remembered:
vi
vi
No shill is gonna convince me windows is easier to administer.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
look at all the flames !! man who approved this story ... it's one of those story that could even /. /. :S
RUPERT! I TOLD YOU TO WATCH THE BAGS! You were looking at the boys again, WEREN'T YOU.
After reading your posts the only thing I can think is this.
Daaaaaaaaaa
there are several stats to consider
how much scheduled downtime is needed (minimally disruptive on most services)
how many brief outages that mean no significant downtime but could possiblly cause users problems (e.g. losing thier place in an online form sequence and having to start from scratch, losing a file they were trying to save etc) happen.
how many and how long are the significant periods of unplanned downtime.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
In a properly set up environment, rebooting a single server doesn't mean the overall system has had downtime.
What, your BS meter running Windows?
The migration from UNIX and Windows NT 4.0 here was in 2002. Since September 10th 2002, we have been a 99% Windows show.
Linux used to be slow, arcaic and fussy about hardware... but I'm not claiming its any of the above now.
Scheduled tasks (somewhat the equivalent of chron)doesn't need to record any passwords or such thing (at least now you can run the task with the system account). Things are very much different with Longhorn (no not Vista, Longhorn, the as of yet un-named future of Windows Server).
Oh common, we techie guys ain't that stupid! Hellllloooooo????? Windows higher uptime than Linux? LOL! This is a TOTAL JOKE! are you serious???? we've got Exchange servers and they're crap... always fails... we have qmail runs on RHEL and it NEVER goes down... exchange server limits: you can only use 1000 Exchange servers in the forest can only handle 60,000 queues if you misconfigured exchange especially the Mailbox dir you're screwed Windows overhead + Exchange overhead + 3rd party software like antivirus + Windows GUI overhead = screwed
this is a task that could have easily been scripted.
The only reasonable way that you can compare an oven and a computer is to overclock the CPU and disable the fan.
I was a little disappointed that we couldn't expand the scope of the test to put stuff like Apache and Squid and mySQL through the paces, but the topic was enterprise administration, not publishing live services.
Oh, so in an monocultured LAN where everybody works with MS Office, Exchange and Outlook Windows is easyer than Linux?
Big news.
Who are you trying to fool? The best Windows admins are Linux people because they know that you need to keep Win of the net or patch and tweak it untill everything but the most needed services are turned off. My Windowses run longer than anybody elses and hardware recognition works most of the time. Installing Games and one-click windows software packages is quite easy too. But calling that an easy or secure server is a joke.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You forgot the umlaut, Laura. :)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Were no security patches loaded in that whole time? I have seen very few of the many security patches loaded onto my Windows box at work that didn't require a reboot. Almost every one required my machine to be rebooted. So while the Windows boxes may have technically been up running, they were probably so hackable it would be scary.
I find your anonymous story a bit hard to believe.
I couldn't agree more.
The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation
One thing is certain, it's not the lack of documentation. Rather the lack of quality documentation.
On the other hand, nobody can say Windows Server has quality documentation. Have you been to Technet? Hello? It's like they set their marketing team loose and let them make it up as they went along.
What do most people do when faced with the really hard to fix Windows problems? They do as MS suggests and reinstall Windows.
Either that or wade through the bullshit on Technet, try the 25 alleged fixes one at a time. It is like Microsoft doesn't even know it's own Operating System.
We had an application server that crashed everytime anyone logged out. I searched for the stop error in Microsoft's knowledge base, turned up nothing. I searched on Google for the same stop error, it takes me to the Microsoft knowledge base article. The alleged cause was a "missing font" causes terminal services to crash. Fix: Uninstall SP2 or call Microsoft for an untested hotfix. First, what in the hell do fonts have to do with Terminal Server? Second, how did the font dissappear from the system?
For Linux? It seems they get on the net and ask around until they A) find and answer, and B) leave an electronic trail in the process for others with similar problems to find.
I have been lucky enough a few times to accomplish the same with Windows Server. There are a few indispensable NON-Microsoft resources available such as Daniel Petri's website, and the TechGenix websites which have been my only saving grace at time.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Yeah the WIndows servers are beating out the linux competitors because generally speaking people running windows servers have (more) money.... and thus can afford fatter and more reliable pipes.... Just my two cents. -Ian
And you can play around with it without paying out the butt for support. It is called FreeBSD.
I pretty much consider myself an idiot, but having never touched Linux or a free Unix distro, I had a distro installed in approx. 1 - 2 days, and had Apache running in a day or so. If all you need is a basic Apache server set up with the default settings, it is a piece of cake. Now if you want to do virtual domains, etc., it is a little harder, but nothing you need to spend a ton of money on for support.
As far as uptime, if I left my FreeBSD server as is, I fully expect it would run 365 days a year and never fail to serve a web page (excepting a hardware failure, or slashdotting of course).
I also, having never touched Win 2003 before, had it installed in about a day and had the terminal server up in about a day. Having some prior experience with NT 4.0, I can say that 2003 was a great improvement for Microsoft (with the exception of the stupid product activation).
As far as uptime? The hardware the Win 2003 server on is way better than the hardware for the FreeBSD server, but I'm constantly having to reboot it. Things stop working, printing from Quickbooks, printing from the Remote Desktops, it is all flaky. It works perfect for a random amount of time and then quits...with all problems fixed by a reboot.
Heck, our ancient NT 4.0 server with Exchange 5.5 on it, has to rebooted nightly or it hoses up the next day (memory leak?).
And all this time OpenBSD DNS servers (setup by our prior IT guy) and the FreeBSD servers, sometimes only go down when the power is out long enough to let the UPS batteries run out...and sometimes I reboot the FreeBSD server when I'm too lazy to figure out how to stop a process and restart it (so if up time was a goal of mine, I could even greatly improve it if I so desired).
Usuper_ii
Ron Paul
I'm tempted to scream 'bullshit,' but I'll try to be rational instead.
You're confusing two independent items here: Ease of administration and quality of documentation. These are NOT the same thing, and one does NOT compensate for the other. As much as you can say, "lack of docs is total crap" (because Linux is SOOOOOO easy to administer), someone else can say that "Ease of administration is total crap" because no matter how obscure, it's properly documented.
As long as consistent, high-quality documentation is considered unnecessary (or for that matter, total crap), Linux will remain an OS that doesn't get taken seriously, regardless of who uses it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Exchange is an enterprise service but Office and Outlook aren't. The linux distros didn't only came with sendmail which doesn't take advantage of DNS and LDAP by default. Exchange's integration with Active Directory offers tons of functionality and ease of user administration. Exchange makes it a snap to associate additional email addresses with a single user account, remote access, security management, and Kerberos handshaking. All that stuff has to be done manually in linux, bringing many dissimilar services in sync.
And I don't know why you're bringing up security. That wasn't in the scope of my paper so I'm not educated enough on the matter to defend it.
So, do they teach you guys that in Bangalore, or are you posting from Microsoft's new campus in Mumbai?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
My Motorola cable box/dvr crashes about twice a month. On the menu it says "Microsoft enhanced". When playing recorded TV, the sound or video often won't start, and I have to stop the video and start it again, sometimes several times, before it will play. The hard drive is only 120GB, and I can't replace it with a larger one. It has I/O for USB, firewire and other interfaces, which are unusable because they are not supported by the software in the box.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This article isn't anyway. This group has been paid by M$ to do "objective" research many times in the past and they never come out showing M$ on the losing side of those "objective tests." One such propaganda device was M$ using the story of a company "Envirotactics" in New Jersey moving from Linux to M$'s server platform after the "Blaster Virus" brought their network down and cost them $5,000 to $10,000 daily during the outage, and the general headaches it caused. Ironically, that is impossible as the Blaster Virus/Worm is and was an IE/Explorer security hazard, something not even present on a Linux system without emulation - and certainly not "critical to the stability of the OS" as (Internet)Explorer is to Windows. Funny enough, NetCraft shows their web server to be an HPUX (HP's Unix) software base, not Windows and IIS. M$ Propaganda/Article Site: http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/case-studie s/CaseStudy.aspx?CaseStudyID=15438
NetCraft result:
http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=http%3A%2F%2Fw ww.envirotactics.com%2F&position=limited&lookup=Wa it..
-- "You must be the change you desire to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi --
Windows Servers Beat Linux Servers
I believe that was the title of a third-season episode of Sliders, since only in an alternate Universe could it be true.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I won't compare apples to oranges, but we have two DNS servers in my shop. One running Windows and one running Linux. Both have gone down. The Windows one from bad updates, brute force attacks, and just running to long without a reboot. The Linux box from hard drive and hard drive controller failure and someone kicking the network cable out.
On top of that we have a Linux box runing our student network (Nocat) and that only goes down when we take it down reguadless to the amount of P2P and streaming media traffic the students push though it. Win 2k3 is the most solid OS Microsoft has put out, but I have yet to see a case where you can go more than 45 days without a reboot for something.
And that's what I think.
How much did M$ pay the Yankee group for this report?
To resolve this dilema we need to invoke the Twins Paradox.
Suppose a Linux server and a Win2k3 server were first commissioned on the same day. Now suppose we launch the Linux box on a 2 year round trip voyage that reaches speeds a significant fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum. When the Linux server returns its clock, which was slowed by the relitivistic effects of acceleration during the journey will report 20% less uptime on its clock (or is it the Win2k3 box that has 20% more - who cares - point made).
Now all we need to do is solve for what the maximum speed and acceleration our hardware can take, invent the technology, and then the article is perfectly true. Einstein would be so proud.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
the biggest flaw I see in the study is not the timeframes, maybe Red Hat was down for longer, but in the reason given -
/me walks away sadly, shaking his head
But standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from "niche" open source vendors, are offline more and longer than either Windows or Unix competitors, the survey said. The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation.
In other words, the technicians running the study did not know how to fix the problems. Now what the hell has technician's ignorance got to do with an OS's reliability? Just because the guy running the box doesn't know what he is doing, doesn't imply that the OS is unreliable.
http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/yankee-gro upsunbelt-2006-server.html
if you read that article:
Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Linux with customizations and Novell SuSE Linux all reported roughly equivalent per server, per year outage times of just under 800 minutes. Surprisingly, Red Hat Enterprise Linux standard distribution users reported said they experienced 900 minutes of per server, per year.
I guess that is wherer the 20% more uptime thing is comming from.
and here is another factiod:
Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 recorded the greatest number of Tier 1 Reliability related incidents -- nearly 3 incidents per server, per year for Windows 2000 Server and 2.5 Tier 1 reliability incidents for each Windows Server 2003 system annually. Still, the actual number does not vary substantially from rival platforms.
There in no religion higher than truth.
"You mean for people who can't calculate."
Like you:
99.886% means 99.9% (three nines).
But, wait:
It means 99.99% too, and that's four nines!
Obviously, five nines is better than four nines, exactly ten times better, but quite a lot of people would be satisfied enough with "only" four nines.
Not to talk about those people that want five nines but then are quite happy with the "for UNPLANNED downtime" clause, which makes only four nines or even less when "planned outime" is added to the equation.
"Use the preview button".
/me ducks
So I think I pressed "Submit" quite too fast.
Ok: 99.886% is three nines, but it is not four.
99.886->99.9->99.89.
You said: "Windows came out on top by a huge margin in every field - ease, usability, intuitiveness, support, everything" Aren't 3 of those 4 basically the same thing: "ease", "usability", "intuitiveness"? Were those your four main categories of analysis? Those are all classic Windows strengths and the very core of the Windows Server value proposition. If that's indeed what your business most needs, your analysis does make sense. I can't say I'm shocked by "support" either... it's where you extrapolate to "everything" that I start to wonder what I'm missing.
I guess the other main question is who picked the experts; was it you or Microsoft?
Best,
--LP
Obviously, five nines is better than four nines, exactly ten times better
.99999/.9999 = 1.0009009009
No, that's not true.
So, it's 0.09009% more uptime. Not worth writing home about unless you are a telco or a factory that (a) doesn't shut down for Christmas and (b) don't have clustered[0] redundancy.
[0] Which is why VMS is still controlling some factories: you can upgrade from VAX to Alpha to Itanium in a rotating fashion, always leaving at least on system up and running.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Those weren't the exact criteria we evaluated, but the project was intended to test the "hard" and "soft" aspects of installing services. This absolutely included a degree of technical comparison, but also considered how the testers felt about the procedures they did themselves and what the other guy did. The white paper is now property of Microsoft so I'm deliberately skimming the details. Sorry.
:)
Microsoft contracted the company I work for to select similar experts based on specified minimum criteria. I'm not sure what that criteria was, but they both had at least 10 years of experience and more than one certification pertaining to their OS of specialty. Incidentally (I assume), they both prescribed to their "OS religion" and had a lot to prove to eachother. It was really entertaining and educational watching them argue, but it was all in good spirits.
Hi, :
Thanks for your response. Your comments are duly noted. Christina Oh and I will discuss the matter this morning. As an FYI, the body of the report does state that Windows Server 2003 experienced 20% less downtime than Red Hat Linux standard distribution. Laura
06/07/2006 07:52 PM
Subject RE: Press Release Error?
Laura,
This is simple math and, unfortunately and respectfully, you have it wrong. And no, it is not semantics. You're press release says 20% more uptime. Uptime is time running. To get 20% more uptime in a year based on a difference of 16 hours - 12.8 hours, or 3.2 hours net difference (RHEL standard) is just bad math. 3.2 hours more Windows uptime than RHEL out of 365 days = 3.2 / (24 hours * 365 days) = 3.2 hours / 8760 hours = 0.037% more uptime.
So, you can write the sentence only two ways:
Windows had 0.037% MORE UPTIME than RHEL or, Windows had 20% LESS DOWNTIME than RHEL
but...
Windows had 20% more uptime than RHEL is absolutely and mathematically wrong, misleading and could subject YankeeGroup to bad PR and possibly legal action.
I will put this another way...
All the hours in a year = 8760
Windows Server ran 8760 - 12.8 hours = 8747.2 hours. RHEL ran 8760 - 16 hours = 8744 hours. The difference is, as you see, 3.2 hours. Okay?
8747.2 divided by 8744 = 1.000366 or 100.0366%
IF Windows had 20% MORE UPTIME than RHEL, and Windows had 8747.2 hours, THEN mathematically RHEL would have run only 7289.333 hours. The difference is 1457.867 hours, or 60.744 days. So unless you believe that Windows outran RHEL for nearly 61 hours, which you agree it did not, then the sentence in that paragraph is just not true - no semantics about it.
Does the additional explanation help (I hope so). I know you don't intend to mislead readers, but the current press release creates a credibility gap for the firm that out to be addressed. Youu may also wish to contact the analyst relations folks at Redhat too...
Cheers,
------------------ From: LDiDio
Sent: Wednesday, June 07, 2006 7:27 PM
Hi, :
Thanks for taking the time out of your schedule to write to us regarding your concerns with the wording of the press release.
I think we're dealing with semantics here.
Here are the actual numbers we found:
Windows Server 2003 recorded an average downtime of 770 minutes or 12.8 hours per server, per year Unix servers recorded an average downtime of just under 600 minutes or about 10 hours, per server, per year Red Hat standard servers recorded an average downtime of approximately 950 minutes or roughly 16 hours, per server, per year Red Hat custom Linux distributions (and I'm referring here to instances in which corporations have modified the kernel) recorded an average downtime of 750 minutes or 12.5 hours, per server, per year.
The high end of the downtime -- the 19.5 hours, does not refer to Red Hat and the press release does not claim that it does. As an FYI, the press release statement citing the 10 hours to 19.5 hours of per server, per year downtime are the high and low ranges. However, for the record, the 19.5 hours on the high end is not Red Hat. That actually refers to Debian (big surprise there!) which according to the respondents scored the worst of any of the 11 different server operating system choices the users were asked to rate. Among niche market Linux and open source server distributions, Debian had the dubious distinction of recording the highest outage time: 1,170 minutes per server, per year, which equals 19.5 hours. Other niche market Linux distributions such as Turbolinux and Mandriva fared better: they each experienced approximately 960 minutes of outages, equating to 16 hours of per annum downtime for each server.
So the actual downt
[]s
Massa
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
How can they say there is little documentation when the entire project is open for reading? I know I've been told that even though there may be some kernel man pages in section 9, the real manpage comes from reading the source.
It's a matter of the documentation hasn't localized into English...it's still in C.
-l
BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 8, 2006--First graph, second sentence of release dated June 5, 2006 should read: In a head-to-head comparison, Windows Server 2003 shows the highest reliability gains, leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux Standard with nearly 20% less annual downtime. (sted leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20% more annual uptime in similar deployment scenarios.)
The corrected release reads:
YANKEE GROUP FINDS ALL MAINSTREAM SERVER OS PLATFORMS EXHIBIT A HIGH DEGREE OF RELIABILITY
Microsoft Windows Exhibits the Highest Performance Platform with the Exception of Unix Distributions
Yankee Group today revealed the results of its 2006 Global Server Reliability Survey, which found that all major server OS platforms have achieved a high degree of reliability. In a head-to-head comparison, Windows Server 2003 shows the highest reliability gains, leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux Standard with nearly 20% less annual downtime. Among mainstream server operating systems, only Unix-based server operating systems including HP-UX and Sun Solaris 10 bested Windows Server 2003.
Ok: 99.886% is three nines, but it is not four. /me ducks
t icle=articles%2Fp2633%2F06cp33%2F06cp33.asp&guid=& searchtype=&WordList=&bJumpTo=True
99.886->99.9->99.89.
Rounding is not a privilege you can just apply at will. If you've studied engineering or physics (chemistry?) you know you that the amount of rounding you have to apply is precisely dictated by the precision of your input values and the calculations done on those numbers. Either rounding too much or too adds unnecessary inaccuracy.
If you've had 10 hours of downtime, you'd know it sufficiently exact to have less than 0.5 hour error, but let's assume 9.5...10.5 hours -> 99.880%...99.892. Less than three nines even in the extremes of your measurement error.
You need less than 8.8 hours downtime to get three nines, which is quite a chunk less downtime than 10 hours (12% less, duh)...
See also here http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?ar
If you have to get there by rounding, you're cheating if you ask me. If you know it's 99.886%, then you know it's less than 99.900%, so you know it's not three nines.
Anybody who knows they are/have been down 10 hours in a year know they didn't get to 99.900%, so if they round it and call it three nines, they are lying.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
We just dumped a Windows based solution for a LINUX/UNIX based one on the ground of reliability alone.
The advice from very high in our food chain was clear: I don't want critical applications running in WIndows.
MS will need far more than dubious benchmarks by companies with a dubious reputation (this Yankee group has been scrutinized here and in other sites before) showing marginal advantages over other products to stop the damage to their reputation in many minds.
So to summarise, they've said that Linux gets just over 364 days of uptime per 365 days whilest Windows gets 437 days of uptime per 365 days. I want one of those windows servers that can accumulate well over a year's worth of uptime in a year.
Simple. The Windows machine probably had a dual-core CPU.
"Rounding is not a privilege you can just apply at will."
Yes I can, given the circumnstances.
"If you've studied engineering or physics"
I did.
"you know you that the amount of rounding you have to apply is precisely dictated by the precision of your input values and the calculations done on those numbers"
I know.
But!
"Either rounding too much or too adds unnecessary inaccuracy."
That's untrue. Well, exactly the untrue part is the "unnecessary" one. I am the one deciding how much accuracy I want for my published data. I can't offer better accuracy on the results than that from the input (so I can't sum up 3.5 plus 3.1 and say it's 6.60), but I can take out accuracy as much as I need/want it.
So yes: 9.890 *is* 9.9 as long as that's the precision I want/need for my result (note that I said it's 9.9, but I can't say it's 9.90).
"If you have to get there by rounding, you're cheating if you ask me"
Not at all: regarding physical measures, 99.9 covers everything from 99.85 to 99.94 when measured by more sensible means. 99.886 is well between the marks. Were I interested in the maximum "legal" precision, I'd have to say that 99.886 is 99.89, but if I don't want it, I'm safe. Heck, I could even say that 99.886% is 100% (three significative ciphers). It sound strange just because 100% "seems" to be nothing but the absolute celing but then, a measure of 49.886% is validly roundable to 50% if so I want (for whatever reason) to use only two significant ciphers (and now it doesn't sound extrange at all). What I can't do is operate that 50 and offer anything better than its significance.
"Anybody who knows they are/have been down 10 hours in a year know they didn't get to 99.900%, so if they round it and call it three nines, they are lying."
No, they are not: they are just reducing measure precision*1: a bridge 200m long doesn't become a bridge 200.25m long just by adding a 25cm brick at one side.
*1 Of course they can decide to reduce measure precision for some unveiled unethical reason but that's quite a different matter.
"So, it's 0.09009% more uptime."
Yes. And that's ten times better because that means ten times less downtime. You go from an expected limit of 10 units/time downtime period to 1 unit/time downtime period.
"*1 Of course they can decide to reduce measure precision for some unveiled unethical reason but that's quite a different matter."
;-)
That's really what I meant. I expect a vendor claiming X nines not to get there by rounding but by actually getting that exact uptime or better.
But then again, I have been known to have unrealistic expectations before
Maybe I should just demand a nine more than I know I will need...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.