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NYSE Moves to Linux
blitzkrieg3 writes "The New York Times is reporting on how the NYSE group now feels that Linux is 'mature enough' for the New York Stock Exchange. They are using commodity x86 based Hewlett-Packard hardware and Linux in place of their traditional UNIX machines. From NYSE Euronext CIO Steve Rubinow: 'We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix. No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX, and we feel the same way to some extent about Solaris. Other reasons cited for the switch were increased flexibility and lower cost.'"
...I one-upped the people that skip reading article summaries and skipped reading the title.
It should be noted that the problems the NYSE is dealing with are very remote from those that the average desktop user is.
Now I know this seems obvious, but the "WOW if the NYSE is doing it!" crowd should try and control themselves at least a little.
Funny how the preceding article to this one on the main page is about Failure Cascades.... ;)
And who wins? HP of course. Who loses? Sun. Now if they had switched to/from Windows, then it'd be big news. As it is, it's not that big of a deal since Linux is in plenty of mission critical systems. The hospital I used to work at had Linux machines controlling their linear accelerators in radiation oncology.
"If there's one thing the market hates, it's crashes."
So apparently 2007 is- err, was- the year of Linux on the desktop- err, the New York Stock Exchange. Anyway, w00t.
Deleted
Linux this, KDE that, Wikipedia here... What all of Free has in common is "Openness" - imagine twenty years from now: I believe that more and more content will move towards a modern variation of the "stone soup" parable until its the defacto standard. Openness allows the rapid creation and innovation of practically anything under the sun. And that pool only gets larger everyday. The only thing that can stop it is if government explicity steps in and makes giving away your effort illegal - other than that it is simply inevitable, give or take twenty years - that Openness will be the primary regulating force for all manner of content.
Shh.
How is Linux worse then Windows for downtime? In Windows, I had to reboot on almost a weekly basis at least, with Linux even with an application crash or so, the most I have to do is CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE to kill X. Sure Linux might not have the "reliability" of other UNIX-like systems, but it is much newer then UNIX and therefore hasn't had much time to be reliable. In my few years of working with Linux there never has been more then 3-5 minutes of downtime due to software, and that was just doing risky stuff that we shouldn't have attempted. All other faults were due to the hardware themselves, the Linux kernel is very very very stable (way much more than Windows) and most applications are very stable also.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
(I also go by gQuigs)
It doesn't worth being slashdoted at all.
If they moved all their computers using ANY OS including MS's, that might be a good story.
Until then, THANK YOU, COME AGAIN!
Read and Comment at my BLOG
!!!
The NASDAQ exchange, which has always focused more on technology, is totally a Microsoft fanboy. Maybe that's because MSFT is the largest stock on the NASDAQ exchange.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Whoever claim 5 nines uptime is an idiot.
Do the math, 99.999% means 1 hour downtime in 10 years.
And of course, if the same people get (much) better uptime from HP-UX and AIX than Linux, of course it is not Linux that is less reliable...
Linux has its places. A mission critical database server is not one of them.
FTW!!!!!
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I work in Healthcare IT
Voluntarily? I think that alone is enough to call the rest of your opinions into question.
I'm kidding, I'm just kidding... but I worked with Kaiser Permanente IT in Oakland, CA for 3 or 4 years, so I'm not really kidding. They were a bunch of mindless jerks, running NT 4.0 on like 50,000 end user desktops in 2004 because they couldn't port client/server apps to any other platform or migrate away from the old app. Ask me about the time when Slammer was going around and they had to send monkeys to every desktop PC in the building (if not the whole company) to install patches... from a floppy disk.
What sort of "mission critical stuff" are you worried about? Lotus Notes 4.0? I'm pretty sure that runs on Linux too.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
so you work with systems that are either poorly maintained or run buggy software. Having worked with all the major flavors of Unix over almost twenty years, I've found the major GNU/Linux distros can be just as reliable. And I've encountered the occasional core-dumping bugs in HPUX, Solaris, AIX that were show stoppers (read patch lists for any of them, *someone* had to be a victim of the bad oopses.) Windows is a desktop system that's been stretched into something it had no business attempting, though maybe server 2003 is good enough for enterprise use.
It's just a pity that Oracle doesn't think so.
and I'm a mindless jerk too, for not closing that italics tag. (use the preview button)
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
'We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix. No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX, and we feel the same way to some extent about Solaris. Other reasons cited for the switch were increased flexibility and lower cost.'"
I thought Solaris was open-source?
Linus Torvalds, Congratulations. MJ
"In Windows, I had to reboot on almost a weekly basis at least..."
Just anecdotal experience but the Windows 2000 and 2003 boxes I've administered have been rock solid other than the occasional box which was running a flaky application. It never surprised me to see a random blue screen with Windows NT boxes but a blue screen on a 2000 or 2003 server was always a surprise. Having said that, I'm not sorry at all to see a major, high visibility implementation of Linux. I hope they have much success.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
"If there's one thing the market hates, it's crashes."
No fooling.
I used to work on Amdhall's unix for their mainframes. Among other things it was used by brokerages to support trading and all the Baby Bells to support data collection for billing.
If a baby bell's billing system went down all the phone calls dialed, started, or completed while it was down were free. This made downtime cost something like $4 million / hour.
Brokerage support going down cost far more.
So imagine a trading system going down (equivalent to all the brokerages going down at the same time...)
Needless to say, much of the point of mainframes is to keep this from ever happening.
So the hardware is built so it performs the correct computation despite component failures, radiation-flipped bits, or on-the-fly hardware changes (adding/deleting/resizing peripherals, CPUs memory, switching out failing components), etc. And the software is built to similar standards.
This can cause problems. Like sizing event counters to stand uptime measured in decades. Or getting non-critical patches installed. (I recall a minor patch to a driver, too small to rate forcing a couple million bux worth of reboot, that had been installed on all the customers' machines to go live at the next reboot. Two years later (last I heard) they were still supporting the bug because some systems hadn't rebooted yet...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why? Because you have a bug up your ass about MS?
When is the nancy boy Linux crowd worry about improving their offering instead of the evil Microsoft? This isn't about computing, it's about being the biggest kid on the block.[...] Well, you're either a troll or a shill, but I'll toss you a bone either way.
The 'nancy boy' Linux crowd will worry about improving our offering when my cd case at work, for fixing Windows desktops with a blown up registry, is full of Microsoft live cds that I can respin and burn at my will.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Funny, I've done it with several systems. You're the idiot. Hell, I've even had an active directory going since late in 1999. Sure, machines fail, but a system doesn't need to fail. You're the moron.
-John
Do the math, 99.999% means 1 hour downtime in 10 years.
Sure, or about 5 minutes a year. I know Debian systems which get system upgrades once a year, and one reboot is definitely under 5 minutes.
Linux has its places. A mission critical database server is not one of them.
Can you explain why not? What do you know about mission-critical databases that Google and Amazon don't?
I understand the desire of lowering the costs, but how much is an hour of downtime?
I don't know, and I'm not sure why anybody cares. When's the last time you saw a Linux box have an hour of downtime (which would not have also occurred on HP/UX)? My business runs on Linux servers, and we haven't had any downtime in the past year on any of them. I really have to wonder what you're doing if you're having stability problems with Linux database servers.
As you might already have guessed, he didn't get the job.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I never thought I'd see these two words together. UNIX is what happens when you meet a set of interfaces defined by a standards body known as The Open Group.
You, sir, have hit the nail on the head. These days, its all about the software on a UNIX-derived OS. Windows is all about just keeping the machine off of life support. I work for a company that uses nearly as many flavors of OS as Kobe Bryant has had sex partners. Oh yeah, sports reference, and this is /. I mean, ...as many OS's as major Slackware releases. (Better?)
Our digital video controllers run SUSE, our network connectivity monitors are Debian-based, our workstations throughout the company are a mix of Windows 2000, XP Pro, and Vista. Heck, our billing software runs on a Tandem! The project I work on is a collaborative mix of the Tandem billing system, a Unix-derived OS middleware, the Solaris cluster application server, and Windows clients. It's a veritable OS soup. Thankfully, on the software side, it's all developed and supported by a 3rd party vendor. Yet through it all, our biggest headache is the Windows clients with their general operating system mishaps. They die unexpectedly, corrupting the MBR. The application suffers from a DLL error that comes and goes with different revisions of the software, etc. The Tandem and middleware have never gone down, and the Solaris cluster has a required program which springs a memory leak requiring a process restart every 30 days or so. That's all. If we could get a way to put our project into the field on a Linux-based platform, my job would consist of reading Slashdot and answering "how-do-I?" emails, not the current daily firefighting.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
...the latest issue of the "Highly Reliable Times".
Agreed. The OP looks like a FUD-spreader to me.
the Solaris that is paid for and is required for a sun supported platform, is NOT OpenSolaris, however much may be in common. Solaris is closed source, period.
wow, this is so lame
I call bullshit. Programs compiled with GCC can have any license the programmer wants! Hell, the *BSD people use GCC to compile programs that have a BSD license.
If Linux has a bug that diminishes uptime at the NYSE and if the Linux "team" of volunteer programmers does not offer a fix within 24 hours, then HP management will order its commercial slave programmers to develop a solution -- pronto.
If a you or I encountered a bug in our Linux downloaded from the Web for free, we would have no immediate remedy to our problem. We must wait for the next release, which could take weeks.
Oh just go away with the no more BSOD's on windows XP ec. bullshit. Yeah, like random reboots are all that much better. Yes, we all know, there is now a windows service that initiates at boot and monitors the system for a crash that would initiate a BSOD, so instead this service reboots the system, like really fucking cool and useful that, a genuine marketdroid M$=B$ exercise in marketing (same number of crashes you only choose whether you BSOD by disabling the service or random reboot).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Just junk food for thought...
And it was so good that I did it five times in a row and now I'm going for a sixth! Too bad your windows makes you impotent!
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Who is the bastard who tagged this as "badidea"?
Why would conversion to Linux be a bad idea?
"Oh just go away with the no more BSOD's on windows XP ec. bullshit. Yeah, like random reboots are all that much better. Yes, we all know, there is now a windows service that initiates at boot and monitors the system for a crash that would initiate a BSOD, so instead this service reboots the system, like really fucking cool and useful that, a genuine marketdroid M$=B$ exercise in marketing (same number of crashes you only choose whether you BSOD by disabling the service or random reboot)."
Wow, who pissed in your Cheerios? I didn't think I said anything that warranted being treated like a MS fanboy. How did XP find its way into the discussion? I was talking about servers and the servers I ran were mostly rock solid with negligible BSOD or random reboots that were always traceable to the applications they ran or flaky hardware like PCI serial boards or the serial devices that attach to them.
Get a grip dude.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
You need a new lawyer- or to stop trolling- whichever you find most applicable.
The other thing is: How is the NYSE handling integration of Linux into a windows network? I am sure there are a few windows boxes at the exchange. There is this guy at www.linux.com who is claiming or alleging that Ubuntu is hard to integrate in a Windows network. Here is the link http://www.linux.com/feature/122681
On a personal note, I'd rather have Linux have better configuration tools OR the same or similar format in its configuration text files. One particularly hard configuration file to modify is the Dovecot/Postfix LDA. This is what I mean, have a look:
dovecot unix - n n - - pipe
flags=DRhu user=vmail:vmail argv=/usr/lib/dovecot/deliver -d ${recipient}
Yes, you have to deal with this stuff, and only God knows what those "-" mean. For those that might not know, the user's line above one MUST look alike for the server to work. This is a far cry from Samba's configuration files that are much simpler.
Last but not least, can the folks at the NYSE confirm or deny that all server tasks are now handled by Linux? I hope they are, but would not be surprised if they come out and say they cannot confirm or deny that very fact.
"It's the smell ... don't you agree, Mr. Anderson?"
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well Guys...
For what it's worth:
When I went to Iraq, I had a laptop running ubuntu. I setup apache2, php5, and mysql5. We created our own "series of tubes" in our barracks area and I supplied our own intranet website (read: porn server). Oh, and America's Army server.
This thing ran for several months at a time without a reboot. The only reboots were due to other problems, like when a stray 7.62mm bullet knocked out our generator one time, but as for linux running...this thing ran like a champ. In 11 months of service, it never had a problem.
Of course, it wasn't under the same kind of load. But my NIC was usually maxed out for 40% of the day.
For consumer-grade hardware with free and open software, 0% downtime not energy related, I feel that Linux did a fine job. Seriously, 11 months, 3 reboots due to power. Nice.
THL phish sticks
Sure, those options work, but I think you overlooked one of the most obvious solutions. If you're running a business that depends on a Linux-based solution, and you encounter a bug that seriously degrades your platform's stability, you always have the option of hiring a programmer to develop a patch.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Quote; And who wins? HP of course.
HP does indeed win, but I have to say I never thought I'd see the day when HP offered Linux over HP-UX on their servers. That alone is as significant as IBM's push on selling Linux-based server systems when they own AIX. Things have really changed, for the better I think.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Very few businesses really care much about the sticker price of an operating system. What many businesses are catching on to is that Linux has little to no vendor lock-in. It goes something like this:
Develop all your software and systems on one Linux. Then find out you don't like HP? Fine.. take your business to Dell. The distribution they're running on starts to suck rocks? No problem, switch to RHEL. RHEL starts to not meet your needs? Customize your own distribution.
Not being tying your business to the whims of whatever company you're dealing with is truly powerful. If you ask me, that's the real power of Linux, and open source software. Linux makes operating systems into a true commodity like grain, where switching to another vendor is low cost.
AccountKiller
NYSE moves to Nonstop on Itanium2, and oh yeah also some GNU/Linux x86 servers on the side. Time will tell if Nonstop is as good on Itanium as it was on MIPS.
You know, if you don't even bother to reformat your article, it really does sound like a cut'n'paste troll. Let's check...
Well, here's one. Must be a fairly new cut'n'paste troll.
I'll have some fun with it anyway, and feel free to copy and paste my response anywhere you see this troll:
That really dates this troll, or at least, the troll wants us to think it is that out of touch. Seriously, who uses TokenRing or ext2? (Oh, and you can defrag ext2, if you really, really want to.)
Sucks to be you. Try reading the license.
That's General Public License.
Indeed it does, but only to whoever you distribute binaries to.
If you're sending free binaries to your competitors, sure. But you'd have to be retarded to do that.
Absolutely untrue.
If you're rewriting it anyway, why not give away your hard work? Worked well for id software.
And of course, no mention of exactly how that's more fair, other than this comparison to such a strawman GPL.
Except, of course, a top online investment firm kind of proves you wrong there. I'll point to Amazon EC2 and consider the discussion closed.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I think another part of the problem is that people compare their Windows desktops to an Enterprise Windows server and assume they have the same issues b/c they might run the same or a similar OS. Think about how much crap people install on their desktops compared to how a true server (should) be run. I've seen many Linux, Unix and Windows *servers" with 365+ days of uptime because they are run the "correct" way. I think part of the issue is your run of the mill Jr Windows admin is more likely to junk up a Windows Server than a run of the mill Jr Linux or Unix admin would junk up their respective systems.
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
Skype is closed source, Opera is closed source, Acrobat is closed source, Google apps are closed, Vmware, etc. Really the list goes on and on. Just have to go to http://freshmeat.net/ to get an idea of what software is under what license. I know this is a copied story that's used for flamebait but whoever wrote it limited themselves just to one way to do things and didn't really educate themselves to the rest of what was already available. It happens a lot and it obscures other realistic avenues for developers within the community. Considering that the NYSE has a dedicated IT staff then the they should focus a lot on in house programming much like most of the corporations and hospitals out there. Now, trying to profit off of someone else's work by reselling that work with your modifications is another thing in which this story implies. For which should be said, shame on you. It's like saying that everybody out there that offers suggestions to improve Microsoft products now owns all the rights to Microsoft software. Microsoft doesn't work that way so why should Linux. Patents can still be transferred or have their licenses changed. Just look at what happened to XFree86 and the whole xorg joyride. If you want to exploit an innovation then choose another license but make sure you don't profit off of somebody else's work behind their back like SCO tried to do with Novell.
If I recall correctly, 1 year and a half ago only IBM was able to put 64 CPUs on a Xeon based architecture. SLES 9 was only certified for up to 16 CPUs. The 64 bits version did not even support NUMA, and that had a direct impact on OS performance under high load, which I was able to measure very easily. The memory bus could saturate just because the OS was not able to put the processes on the memory chip which was near the assigned processor. That distribution had a 2.6.5 kernel version. Redhat was almost on the same kernel version. The version under development was 2.6.17. Suse said that NUMA was going to be supported in SLES 10, which shipped one year ago. I don't know if it did.
I guess the situation has improved in the last year, but my point is that linux is a newcomer in the big iron world.
But the point is that Sun/HP/IBM have been managing big irongs with more than 64 cpus for 5-10 years already, in critical mission bussiness.
This is a political decision. Not a technical one. Linux has it's role in the server market, and it's a very important one. But I think it's not still mature enough to compete in high-performance, high scalable, mission critical environments with OS/400, AIX, Solaris, etc. Neither are the OS suppliers, Suse and Redhat.
He restarted a single process on the Solaris box once a month. He didn't say he rebooted the whole thing.
Oi vey, what schmucks.
Go shave your hands.
I wonder what will happen to regular slashot ads of Get the facts - "Roll over this ad to know why NYSE switched to Windows Server from Linux to lower its TCO". /duck
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
Point taken.
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
I do not have the $ to to branch Linux and hire 100's of phd's to build me a *custom* version of Linux specific to my organization. They are essentially stealing Linux and never give back any of the most interesting code to the comuuuuuuuunity. That is not open source, it's called leeching. And that is exactly what Amazon and Google has done with their own *NIX variants. You fanboi's should be up in arms about this, not praising the big boys for stealing and branching Linux for their own proprietary uses.
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Psssst... The NYSE has been running on an IBM mainframe for quite sometime now.
They had a choice of moving from a 1,600 MIPS mainframe to a 2,500+ MIPS mainframe OR rewriting all the code and moving to a distributed setup. They chose the distributed setup to avoid hardware related vendor lock-in, not because of software.
Even though they're saying "We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix," he said. "No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX..." their new system will be IBM p servers running AIX and x86 HP servers running Linux.
FYI - Their mainframe was running COBOL and JCL
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
In other news, it's also not the same as running it on a mobile phone.
Nor is it the same as flying a plane.
Was there actually any point to your post at all?
Of all the OSes I've ever used, Windows is the only one that would slowly eat itself over time. Current versions of it are much, much better about this sort of thing, but Windows is the only one that has ever done that at all. I've seen other OSes crash before, and I've even seen them occasionally corrupt a filesytem (well, once...and that was a particularly crappy version of System Vr4). But Windows is the only one I've ever seen that would, after running long enough (where "long enough" depends on which version of Windows you're talking about), start to develop weird, unexplainable problems and generally get very unreliable -- on hardware that proved itself reliable afterwards.
I don't think Windows was release-ready until well after the release of Windows 2000.
As I said, it's significantly better these days, if you exclude Vista (I don't have any experience with Vista so I can't really comment on it). But chances are, that's because what's out there these days has been in the field for years and it's taken that long to work out all the major bugs. No other operating system I've ever used has been like that.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Shhh... the poor loser doesn't get much exposure to actual enterprise systems working at Best Buy.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Considering that their electronic division has big problems paying for software they buy, the fact that they go to a "free" option is a HUGE shock.
NOT!
Hopefully their application developers are getting substantial percentages in advance.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Been running one of the redhat rip-offs for a while now. CentOS I believe?
Buy hey, glad to know the 'old boys' are finally catching up.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Most recently notable comes from the Gartner group : Here
The Gartner group, while I've never completely believed in, states that Linux will kill off most large installations of Iron Unicies by 2009. While I believe this is a bit optimistic and the reality is that it will never truly die, Linux continues to take more market share away from other UNIX installations than Windows.
> ...random reboots that were always traceable to the applications they ran...
Clearly the person you are responding to is quite clueless, but I have a question about this part. Do you mean that the applications that the servers ran could cause system crashes or "random reboots?" Isn't the point of stability that the system prevent any malfunctioning/buggy applications from hosing the system? Are user-space apps causing instability or do you guys have special drivers installed? If your user-space apps are able to bring down a system, then I'm not impressed with MS servers. But I haven't worked with MS servers, so I thought I would try to get this clarified so I'm not left with a wrong impression.
Cheers.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
the answer to five 9s uptime is to stop building systems that rely on single points of failure. Compare Google's approach to processing and uptime to that of the mainframe era. Totally different infrastructures with similar goals and globally, similar uptimes/reliabilities. Design your systems such that any component (any switch, router, power supply, hard drive, server ... to a certain degree, even any individual data center) can fail without resulting in a loss of data. Sure, it's complicated - but it can be done, and it's definitely the direction that network and systems architectures are headed.
illum oportet crescere me autem minui
No, their mainframe was running OS/390.
JCL is the mainframe equivalent of bash or csh.
COBOL is the business world equivalent of C/Java/Basic.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
and:
I take that to mean exactly what I just said. If you have any references to more information to support what you're saying about hardware, please reveal them. Otherwise I'll trust the article, and the implications of the statements.
AccountKiller
Having worked in Silicon Alley I can tell you its all about speed and stability. Thats why they are moving to Linux - end of story. Oh and the NYSE has been itegrating Linux into thier systems for a while now. Old news...
"Yes, we all know, there is now a windows service that initiates at boot and monitors the system for a crash that would initiate a BSOD, so instead this service reboots the system..."
I'm amused by this myth that Windows users wouldn't notice their computer rebooting.
Face it, the BSOD (or reboot, as you've re-labled it to maintain your grip on zealotry) virtually went extinct with Windows 2000. With XP, it only improved. If you wish to sit there in denial of that, that's fine, but at least use rationale that's a little more plausible than "Your computer frequently reboots only you don't notice."
Don't get me wrong, it's fun to think about. I mean, if Windows could reboot, put all your apps and windows back, and restore all of the unsaved data, that'd be pretty slick.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
This is anecdotal evidence, but almost all of the problems I've seen in modern-type OSes (Windows NT and most *nixes) have been due to hardware or driver problems. Windows is primarily driver problems because most device markers have to write the driver and it doesn't make them money, so they naturally cobble something together as cheaply as possible. With the *nixes, it's primarily a hardware problem like a disk drive going bad and corrupting data or RAM or the mobo dying due to the drivers almost all being written/approved by the kernel guys and being of higher quality than most 3rd-party stuff. MacOS X problems tend to not be that common, but they are typically OS bugs than anything else. That does not surprise me much as drivers shouldn't be an issue as like in Linux and many other *nixes, the OS kernel guys write most all of the drivers and they should be of high quality. The hardware is also expensive and thus should be quality; also the Mac users I've seen tend to replace hardware much sooner than others do (when a new model comes out) so HW rarely gets old enough to fail. This pretty much leaves the OS as the point of failure, and I've certainly seen systems with The Pinwheel of Death before.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
it is my experience that Linux is not yet reliable for mission critical stuff
I work for NASA (who coined the term "mission critical") and we think it's ready. The IBM A31p laptops onboard the Space Station were recently switched to Redhat. These are the laptops that command to the core computer system and control the vehicle, not just some random payload.
Mission Control in Houston is in the process of switching to RHEL based systems, and should be complete sometime next year.
Worst...sig...ever!
They've been planning it for a long time.
Since I'm not going to do a LexisNexis search for you, here's the next best thing:
http://www.google.com/search?q=nyse+aix+linux
http://www.google.com/search?q=nyse+1600+mips+2500+mips
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Perhaps a nice hook for Linux into some businesses (like NYSE) is the "no conflict of interest" thing. If NYSE was a big customer of a company on its market, there may be some question about propriety.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
by Microsoft
Or develop to POSIX and it doesn't matter which Unix. Or develop on Java and it doesn't matterr which OS. (At least theoretically.)
While portability between distributions may be useful, as a technological base, I don't see what Linux offers that is better than Solaris 10 (and I've used Solaris, Linux, and several BSDs over the past decade--currently favouring Solaris (though FBSD ports still kicks ass)).
(Heh, CAPTCHA is "idealize".
Nope it's Linux. It's happened to some of my customers as well. Obviously it doesn't happen to everyone, but it does happen. I've also had customers on AIX and Solaris that choke up, but they do under much higher usage and much more rarely. If all you do is server web pages, you might get 5 nines, but start dealing with systems that really pound the memory subsystem and you'll see linux start to choke. This was on RHEL3 (was still under support by the way) but it happened under RHEL4 as well. No idea how RHEL5 fares nowadays.
If they're not breaching the terms of the licences under which the software they use was issued, then they are not "stealing" at all. Besides, as far as Google is concerned, for all their closed development and secrecy they do actually give *a lot* back to the community in the form of Summer of Code and many other initiatives.
To expand upon sibling post: You are only required to distribute the source code if you distribute your changed software. In-house changes are fine as long as they stay in-house.
Ok, so Google is not stealing. Leeching maybe, but by no means stealing by the legal meaning of the world. And yes, Google gives quite a bit of code back to the community. I'm fond of their JavaScript XPATH library, it's one of the only ones I've seen that work in a robust cross browser way (even though I've moved to JSON). I guess my question is, can you point me to a public distribution of Linux that will hold up to Six Sigma reliability running a mission critical database server that does not require extensive customization?
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Absolutely. I was once talking about how Linux is a much more reliable solution on an IRC chat room, and a friend of mine mentioned that their Solaris server at a previous job was having extensive downtime.
This is quite definitely attributable to bad sysadmins. I used to sysadmin at a computer cluster at my university, and the line of sysadmins was so strong up to our point, that they had managed to have an uptime of more than a year on the main server running all the crucial services. And, in retrospect, that's not that staggering an accomplishment. Linux can do better. This was an older Debian kernel running on commodity Dell hardware, btw.
For its core applications, claims of Linux not being ready for prime-time are uninformed at best, and lies at worst.
The money system is an insane illusion which either by mistake or design, keeps people enslaved. It has been falling apart of late. (Like a pyramid scheme run by lunatics, it cannot persist).
I've always thought of Linux as being aligned with truth and light, etc., When you shine that flashlight into a corrupt system, things realign to match reality, which in this case, first means total collapse.
It's all metaphoric, of course, but in a universe made out of energy infused with consciousness, it could be argued that this whole world is just a collection of metaphors for various thought patterns. Whatever the case, it's not a bad idea to have a bit of extra food packed away. . .
-FL
Windows costs less fud campaign... maybe just maybe the biggest stock exchange in the U.S. might know a little about value.
Like with every other modern OS, a kernel bug is required for userspace apps to cause Windows 2000, 2003, or XP to bluescreen.
Of course, there've been a few kernel bugs in Windows!
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I worked for the RI Sec of State's office for nearly four years. In that time I saw us go from a 90% OSS shop to a 50% OSS shop because the incoming I.T. director was a Windows only guy.
But the best part is the Windows migration isn't going so well. I left back in September but they had just bought new servers about five months before. They got no further than Server 2003 being installed on them due to documentation procedures, etc.
One server was to be an Exchange 2003 server to replace the Qmail server they were using. I just got email from someone there the other day and guess what, it's still Qmail.
The big push to Exchange btw was a woman named Catherine Avila, the Director of Administration. She was petrified that I.T. could potentially read her email because Qmail stored everything in the users home folder.
When I'd left the tally for hardware and software was up around $60,000. Both we systems guys loudly protested the Exchange bit. Also told them that if you were going to present an Exchange box to to world, you damn well better put something in front of it to stop the bullshit.
And of course when I left I made a prediction that within two months of my departure there'd be some catastrophic event. Sure enough, their web server crapped. The server in question was a LAMP box, and MySQL needs to be tuned occasionally to fix kludgy indices and queries. And that's what brought their web server down. There was a MySQL slave on the box that started consuming mass CPU cycles because of bad queries.
The PR guy said it was a rootkit. I call bullshit.
Somewhere, there are a lot of dead mainframe programmers who just shivered in their graves.... I'm sure of it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
So how would a return to a gold standard work with international trade? The amount of currency is fixed, so paying off our national debt would lead to massive deflation, leading to a recession and a general economic fuckup.
I guess for the 2.0 version of Gandhi, they decided that passive resistance wasn't the best design.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
this sux. they should move to windoze vista home basic
Perhaps he meant a proprietary _implementation_ of Unix, such as IBM's and HP's offerings; however if this is the case I don't know why he put Solaris with it to, now that Solaris is open-source (CDDL)...
Back this up with facts.
Show me a Wall Street Journal article that shows this.
I love Linux but you pretty much have the following:
The Old Linux Guys who beat their chests and pull out hair
The New Guys who won't listen to anything unless it says Linux is the best and then they get into a distribution arguement
Then you hear from the people that ACTUALLY WORK IN A COMPANY ENVIRONMENT that realize that Linux has its place for certain system applications. They also realize that it actually does cost money to switch to Linux.
Yeah Linux is free and takes less hardware...but there is a little thing called OVERTIME.
You want me to pay people to learn a new system and them pay them overtime because they went home to their Windows/Apple system, forgot how Unbuntu/Slackware/Fedora/Gentoo+KDE&GNOME worked and had to come in on the weekend?
No. Ain't happening. You all had your shot 10 years ago and all that is happening now is another generation of recruited zealots (kids) are trying and failing to succeed but they are succeeding at annoying actual professionals.
"I'm fond of their JavaScript XPATH"
JavaScript libraries are so important to run a mission critical linux server.
That's a really great contribution from the work Google has done on linux. Really.
My bet is you don't use compiz, or even X-windows where command line is enough.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
A friend of mine in the air force is in Iraq right now. As part of an "anti-freeware" policy, they won't let him load Linux on his laptop or even visit ubuntu.com in his web browser. Are things different in the army?
Yeah. I think that trying to fix a single element of the existing system would be like trying to re-structure a house of cards.
But systems tend to automatically correct themselves given enough time. A bit of mass-chaos and starvation will lead us to an answer as to how things might better work. It's that uncomfortable period of dark-age in between which nobody likes. --And which explains all the crazy stories of underground bases and general end-of-times preparations which the super-wealthy are running around hoping will save their spotted rear-ends. Until greed and psychopathy are removed from the equation, even a system founded on sense and rationality will break down.
-FL
I do not have the $ to to branch Linux and hire 100's of phd's to build me a *custom* version of Linux specific to my organization.
"Custom"? I've spoken with many Google engineers, and have a family member working there; rest assured, Google's PhDs are not sitting around tweaking Linux to make it stable. The reason they can afford to hire all those people today is because when they had 2 boxes and a disk array built out of Duplo, it was solid then, too, and they could focus their efforts on search. Now that they're huge, they've got some clever redundant distributed architecture which helps them deal with regular hardware failures; it's not there to deal with software instability.
Besides, Larry and Sergei aren't even PhDs themselves, so apparently a PhD isn't necessary to make a stable server running on Linux. They're rich and popular because they started out stable; they other direction doesn't work.
They are essentially stealing Linux and never give back any of the most interesting code to the comuuuuuuuunity. That is not open source, it's called leeching.
No, it's nooooooooot.
You fanboi's should be up in arms about this, not praising the big boys for stealing and branching Linux for their own proprietary uses.
Golly, I guess I'm not a "fanboi'" then. (Oh darn?) I fail to see why anybody "should be up in arms" about some people obeying the license terms for some software.
One process is all that has the problem. It leaks memory at a rate of about 80 MB a day...which is seriously not too shabby for a memory leak. Once it claims about 3 or 4 GB (this lovely Solaris box has 16 GB), we just bounce the server that spawns that process, and the memory is released. We do it outside of business hours via a cron now, and the end users have no idea it ever happens. The only reason we caught it was these strange system slowdowns every 4 months or so.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
.... don't talk about it. Honest, you just look stupid.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You're comparing Linux to Windows. In this case the transition was from commercial Unix to Linux.
jesus fucking christ how do you get trolled so goddamn hard?
But if we remove the idea of scarcity from both sides. Infinite labor supply also means an infinite demand for your product, even if almost everyone thinks it's useless. Course, then you get into the problem of distrubuting an infinite number of a worthless product across an infinite space... which starts to sound a lot like most of the stock traded on NYSE.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I mean, you might as well go for broke.
:-)
Enron did
Insert
Dude, you need a telescope to see this implementation. Don't say it's highly visible ;-)
nosig today
Maybe you !write code.
Microsoft continues to plow through the small and medium business market with SBS installations and continues the current uptake rate IIS has over Apache... while Linux zealots continue to focus on the desktop... while touting victories over.... main frames? uhh...?
:( Even mentioning Linux makes these people think you're some kind of evil super hacker. I just say 'open source' based now, to avoid unapproving looks.
Do the majority of linux/open source advocates realize that SMB is where its at right now in terms of market growth? The majority of them are obviously from the development side of things... it's like they're not even paying attention to the consultants.
I've been running Linux since 95'(slackware baby!), yet I find I am unable to push a Linux solution for most small businesses except for gateway/firewalls and NAS stuff. Please don't talk to me about exchange alternatives and/or open office. SMB's want their Word/Excel/Exchange.
... we're talking.
;-) -- lives with occasional hiccups. More than once I had my email client unable to use over-the-network folders (which theoretically are safer).
The government, for instance -- and don't ask how I know
Application servers are out now and then. Heck, some are even rebooted on purpose every night, because they fear service would degrade without that.
This Christmas, all the evil commercialization aside, brings nonetheless some useful observations. Stores are not allowed to stop, because they're full of customers until midnight and everyone is tired. Many point-of-sale terminals use Linux. I even know of a chain supermarket which had a very old setup, with WindowMaker terminals running curses-based apps.
Well, they replaced the terminals with XP machines -- connected to a Linux server still running the same curses-based apps! Tell me about hating crashes!
That happens when you let clueless people who are proud of their Windows certifications mess with it.
I know several companies and research institutions where people who probably got less pay set up a Linux based system that just works. Flawlessly.
Linux from Scratch?
Probably RedHat - it's IMO about as proprietary as the rest of the commercial Unices mentioned - if not more, if you consider Solaris vs. OpenSolaris.
It has some nice kicks, but trying to do anything with it that doesn't come out-of-the-box is a nightmare.
Just try maintaining a Typo3 installation on it...
But for the NYSE-stuff (which is probably mostly J2SE/J2EE stuff), it should be good.
I'd still prefer Solaris for that, though.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
I do some programming on my windows machine and although it has 3 gigs of RAM the computer will constantly fail on me. XP gets to the point where it won't open new dialog boxes until I close another window. The box never crashes but it becomes unuseable after a few days.
Obviously you can blame this on the particular applications...If I take it easy on the machine it will stay up for weeks.
When people say that their machine never crashes what have we learned? Nada.
In Windows, I had to reboot on almost a weekly basis at least,
Hah!, you must be using Win2000 or older. In Windows XP I NEVER have to reboot myself....
Thats cause the darn fucking thing keeps restarting automatically without asking me. Just yesterday I was video-talking over skype when suddnely all the windows started closing and the darn shit restarted... I would be talking in Ubuntu but that shit (-1 troll i know) has no video support for skype (or is it the other way around? skype has no video support for that shit in Linux, there, dont mod me down haha).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Sigh, how did that get modded up?
This anecdote of some n00b's pr0n server running on a laptop in Iraq of all places could not be LESS relevant to conditions in the NYSE's data centre.
UNIX has had magnificent uptimes since about 1973. If anyone is surprised UNIX/Linux servers are reliable, they have been living under a rock (or maybe living in Windows-alterna-world).
you had me at #!
Well, like I said, they were very infrequent. The few occasions I saw an apps related issue it was a specialty app for the legal field. The company that sold the app was giving us new replacement files for their app pretty regularly for a while. Sucks to a to be treated as a beta tester for what is supposed to be a production app. The hardware issue is ongoing on 2003 servers and involves multiport serial cards that sometimes cause spontaneous reboots when devices are attached or removed from the serial ports. It's too early to tell for sure but a new driver from the manufacturer may provide a fix. Oddball stuff.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
I wasn't meaning that I had to reboot myself, but all kernel updates (or just about any "major") update required a reboot on my XP machine. And also some misbehaving applications caused Windows to become unresponsive that a reboot would only fix, in Ubuntu on the odd case of a bad app, all I usually have to do is CTRL+ALT+Backspace to kill X.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Even worse is the memory usage. Something eats up the memory and won't give it back. I think it has something to do with video applications but I haven't tracked it down yet. Is it my hardware, device drivers, or what? Beats me, but all I know is that it doesn't work like it should.
I wonder what major IT infrastructure still belongs to proprietary Unix or "Windows". It's funny to me to even mention the name "Windows" because it see,s so silly for an operating system to be named for a feature of a graphical user interface. Suppose they named it Microsoft "Menus" or Microsoft "Buttons"...
Freedom is free.
I am using the same OS as the NYSE? I feel unclean!
"The NYSE's shift toward Linux and x86-based hardware illustrates why consulting firm Gartner Inc. is predicting a slight decline in Unix server revenues over the next five years"
Is it true that people are only moving from Unix to Linux. If a CIO installs Linux on a new site, how is this a loss for 'Unix' but not for Windows, the logic escapes me.
davecb5620@gmail.com
That's really freakin cool but, are you aloud to tell us that?
The servers that were replaced were HPPA boxes running HPUX. HP make a lot of money selling these old boxes. They were replaced with commodity x86 boxes running Linux. That's got to be a big decrease in revenue for them.
The tech guys at SIAC (the IT group at NYSE) has been wanting to do this for over 10 years now. It's taken them that long to get all the software ported over (they run a lot of proprietary code). They are very, very cautious, and would not even think about a switchover like this without extensive research and testing. One of the big plus features of Linux is that they can go in and look at the code to the kernel and understand the performance impact of different design choices. The reason they don't like virtualization is that it adds uncertainty to the system's response time, and they do NOT like uncertainty.
And, at least to my knowledge, there are NO Microsoft products involved in the critical operation of the NYSE. They do not trust Windows. At all. As I said, they really like repeatable, predictable, operation, snd you just can't get that with Windows. There may be a few Windows machines here and there but they are basically passive clients that will not disrupt anything when they have problems.
The NYSE guys are no tech slouches. They have very extensive development and test facilities. The bonus structure of upper management is set up to strongly encourage minimizing downtime. The failures they have suffered in the distant past are deeply etched in their memories and they work very hard to make sure that they will never happen again.
"If a you or I encountered a bug in our Linux downloaded from the Web for free, we would have no immediate remedy to our problem. We must wait for the next release, which could take weeks"
..
Well, personally speaking I emailed one of the developers and got back a reply within the same day. Contrast that with the 'commercial model'. What 'Guarantee of Reliability' does the commercial software sector offer, ninety days or your money back. Certainly no guarantee against some crooks running off with your entire customer database.
was Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (Score:5, Interesting) yet another mod troll
davecb5620@gmail.com
I don't think that any large scale collapse will happen because of cheaper/better solutions. It only means that more people are able to accomplish more things, cheaper/faster/better. The same will happen when we'll finally get insanely cheap energy (hopefully within the next 3-5 decades so I'll be around to witness :). All the collapse that will happen is that antiquated business can't force-feed bad stuff down our throats any more imho.
AFAIK the NYSE doesn't run 24/7, and it only opens for a short time. So while it's not trivial, you can actually fix broken stuff after it closes, and you have quite a lot of time to do it.
Whereas if you have something very important that runs 24/7 you need a system which you can fix while it's running. These type of systems can be a fair bit more complex, so if you don't have good admins they could cause the system to have even more downtimes, negating all that clustering and redundant stuff.
That reminded me of the scene where Bernard Hill in heavy makeup was snarling in Christopher Lee's voice. *
/. have seen the LotR films...
To be fair, a better comparison to that scene would be Microsoft saying, "If we go, this business dies."
* Deliberately obfuscated. Surely most people on
Wow, someone still uses COBOL?
I remember being told I had to learn it as part of my curriculum back in 1994 because the instructor said you might find out someone is using it.
It only took 14 years!
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
I work at a internet service provider, configuring and setting up integrated voice and data network equipment. Honestly, the Healthcare IT I've worked with have been the most incompetent fools I've ever known. The head of IT for a major hospital for example didn't even know how to change IP routes on his internal routers when the hospital decided to switch to us. For days he said it was our problem. Eventually, we got to management and I think he and half of his department got fired.
Indeed - I used to work desktop support at a financial/insurance company, and some of the crap I saw on some of the users' mainframe sessions (you'd think that mainframe programmers should be able to figure this stuff out, but I guess instead of waiting for someone to build a better idiot, Microsoft just makes everyone look like an idiot) was unlike anything I'd seen, until I started poking around on Wikipedia and figured out that what they were doing on "the AS360" (can't remember the number, mainframe wasn't our problem) was this bizarre database (or something) programming language called RPG... oddly enough, saw a COBOL printout on that same person's desk.
Evidently there's still money to be made in selling your soul to IBM and supporting stuff that hasn't been unplugged for decades, much less upgraded.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
>>Since I'm not going to do a LexisNexis search for you
Ooohhhh... you are soooo elite with your lexisnexis access.
Linux is the kernel, licensed under the GNU GPL, but the Linux Kernel project is not part of the GNU project. Obviously it's not all GNU software because it's GNU/Linux which means the Kernel is non-GNU software. Also, in any GNU/Linux, you're going to be compiling with the GCC and using libc. GNU software is at the heart of most any GNU/Linux distro. Get it right man, the GNU project and the GNU GPL came before the Linux Kernel. GNU/Linux is GNU-based, not "Linux-based".
Freedom is free.
Freedom is free.
Software programmers have a habit of fixing things that are not broke. The NYSE is literally handling billions of dollars per day. They can't, and I mean literally can't move to something else just because it does not have the latest and greatest feature. All the NYSE cares about is a working system... Sometimes I wish programmers and developers would keep that in mind.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Stock Exchanges around the world are making the switch - mostly from HP Non Stop Kernel (NSK) Tandem platforms over to either Linux or Windoze. The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX Group) is following the NYSE lead and just started the plunge into production to (RedHat) Linux as well this past Friday to try and save lots of $ by getting off of the HP Tandem. http://www.tsx.com/en/trading/tsxquantum/news_product_info.html http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Information-Architecture/80e2b1ee-2430-48c0-86ba-7e39ef356a52.html At this point they only have their symbol (X) on the stock exchange but expect to rollout in 2008 with the rest of the stock symbols. If they have a system crash (not because of Linux but the app of course) similar to a few times in the 90s they will have their name all over the news in Canada.
Where did people get the idea to re-brand "free software" as "open source"
You can blame/credit Eric S Raymond for that one. IMO he correctly identified that calling it "Free Software" was an appearance problem for a lot of people. People inherently distrust anything that says "free" (as in beer), as there's almost always a catch. I think he may have even coined "open source", but at the very least he's one of the larger pushers of that term. Geeeks don't like to think language matters, but in the rest of the world it does.
Anyway, I have to disagree with your categorization of the GPL as the power of open source. It's just one license among many. I use software that's under the GPL, under the Apache License, and under the BSD license. I really don't care which one it is.
AccountKiller
Correct, except maybe that Cobol ( I don't like it but ) is way over C/Java in business. Once you have done fixed point calculations in C (Java,C++,C#,,,pick your language..) you start understanding what it means to trust the language doing the right thing. Also, I still hope other languages would get the native data types, no problems moving from one platform to another. And maybe another thing about mainframes, you can run 10K+ servers ( Linux ) in one box that will not break down. Now, it depends of application types, should you? Huge transactions, lot's of data, are the best in mainframe, think moving data in xxx GB's/second between your servers without external lines, controllers, switches, and so on, almost at memory speed through standard TCP/IP connections. Think about systems with hundreds of CPU's where one, two, three, .. failures only means slowing down a little and only if you are already running near %100 capacity. Of course workload balancing may actually be a little more tricky than in distributed servers but other reasons which can be learned. Stock exchange transactions are small (actually very small) so they may be better in server farms today but the design is not easy, who wants to lose a $100 million sale / buy order! Also, I wonder how they handle the timings? Remember last panic, everybody selling, servers queuing hours, arguments later whose transaction was 1 microsecond before some other? It took years, FCC and courts to solve. Anyway, hats of for NYSE, I remember when Tandem was an unknown and some stock exchanges and banks took the leap and trusted them. Correctly built Tandem systems are still the only real NonStop systems but need skills you can't easily find today. And HP is not helping on that because, like it or not, Tandem is a niche system today and HP doesn't like diversity.
As rumor has it, Hybrid market is going to be shut down and all matching engines moved to ARCA execution platform sometime soon. ETFs are already there. Unfortunately, ARCA listed stock engine is not capable of handling even current load sufficiently well so move is somehow complicated. So really, this is not news worthy. Apparent purpose of Hybrid engine always was to keep specialists goons in business longer.
I would bet that most people when given the words "free software" would think gratis not libre. Also freeware (which is an obvious contraction of the words free and software) has always meant gratis software that is usually written by one or two people. "Open source" isn't a perfect term either but IMO it is far less likely to give the wrong impression than "free software".
As for why the name linux was picked up I'm not sure but I have several ideas. Firstly it is a far nicer name than GNU, secondly afaict linus was the one took gnu, built the crucial missing component (which had been missing for some time due to GNUs dicking arround with microkernels) and put together a system that could actually run on it's own.
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 Windows, I had to reboot on almost a weekly basis at least,
And even if you don't bounce windows server on your own, Microsoft Update will do it for you on a regular basis.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
The application suffers from a DLL error that comes and goes with different revisions of the software, etc.
And you think Linux is gonna fix that? A bad performing application can kill any environment, if you let it. I like Linux as much as anybody, but I think OS's are OS's. Just like people and assholes, every computer has to have one, and they all stink sometimes. Usually when you put shit into them.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
It was Richard Stallman and his GPL that built the Free Software Movement. Before that, there was no idea that proprietary software was anti-ethical (Free Software); the momentum created by the Free Software movement spawned the Open Source movement, with the idea that proprietary software is inefficient.
Without Richard Stallman, Free Software would probably be restricted to university projects.
There's three (at my last count: Red Hat, Suse and Debian) that HP support, so it's likely that the NYSE has its admins working with Debian.
Normally Telco billing systems are multi-tiered, and one of those tiers is what collects CDRs, as the switches have minimal persistent storage.
Whatever collects the CDRs has to be _rock solid_, so is usually an IBM zSeries, Tandem NonStop, or the like, is what processes and stores the detail records from the switch. They are then batched up, as you suggest, for processing in whatever billing system (Amdocs, etc.) the telco is afflicted by , err I man, uses.
-Stu
That matches my experience (and Windows 2000 handles flaky applications much better that Windows 9x), but I'd still like a bit more resilience in these cases.
Currently, the main culprit for crashes on my Windows 2000 machine is Teamspeak:
it tends to crash on disconnect and take the OS down as well
C - the footgun of programming languages
why not freebsd ?????!!1!!!!