Slashdot Mirror
wcarchive Upgraded
aqua writes "Just noticed that ftp.cdrom.com, renowned for being the single biggest/fastest FTP server in history, yesterday quietly received its first hardware upgrade in two years -- the old machine was a single PPro200 / 2GB RAM; it's now a Xeon500 / 4GB. Software and disk stayed the same. Nice to see such a venerated old server get some more ponies under its hood. For the first time it also includes a credit for where they buy their hardware. The message is here. " The good news is that the max. user limit is 5000 now - I hope they have the bandwidth for it. And phil thinks he sends out a lot of data.
Actually, the limit (in linux) is 960MB for some reason on the X86.
Awesome! I didn't think you could make PCs that big. Why can't you make Linux servers like this, or isn't Linux geared for high-end machines?
I think I'm going to try out FreeBSD sometime.
-jd
Sortof...
Try Mingo's patch against 2.1.89. He claims up to 3.8 gigs of memory. I doubt the patch will go cleanly against a 2.2.x tree so try it by hand. Of course there could be something drastically different in the 2.2.x kernels which will fry your board.. Not too likely though.
They can, dimwit. Hell, Linus has 4 Xeons at home.
Somebody is selling an 8-way Linux box.
You need to read the documentation to go past 0.9.
Beyond that... there is a patch under
construction, but it is pretty stupid to think
that you should use a damn 32-bit PC chip
with 4 GB of RAM.
Do you match up an 8 MB video card with a
system that has 4 MB of system RAM? How about
gigabit Ethernet with a 386 CPU? Maybe a Xeon
would go well with a pair of 360kB floppies
and a 300 b/s modem, right?
YO man, take it easy on him. No need to get uppity over something like that.
Some people arent as smart as you, and others are smarter...
only now, at the end, do you realize *the power* of the dark side of the ram cache...
Trust me, when WCarchive releases something new, CRL dies a horrible death. CRL barely has the bandwidth to keep up with JUST cdrom.com
Many of us have seen the notices on the FTP site, just ask jkh about it...
Have you seen the uptime figures on the 8 way box? Linux can barely handle it.
They need to start putting a real OS into that hardware.
I agree, I've never laughed out loud at a slashdot post until now.
Intel uses a 64-bit wide bus operating at 100 MHz.
That gives you about 0.8 GB/s, so it takes 5
seconds just to read the memory under optimal
conditions.
Typical 64-bit processors have 128-bit and 256-bit
busses. Sun ran their bus at 120 MHz last year,
and I would expect 133 MHz to be common now.
That means you get 2 to 4 GB/s on non-PC hardware.
You can read 4 GB in only 1 or 2 seconds.
And not only that...
The Xeon tends to make the Alpha look cheap.
Some of the Xeon boxes are $100000. Ouch!
The Xeon looks like a waffle iron, and needs
to be that way to get rid of the heat.
The Xeon is good for desperate NT admins.
It is good for Intel-only software like Quake.
It is a poor substitute for a 64-bit chip though.
CmdrTaco should find a gigabyte-sized file
on ftp.cdrom.com, and use that as the link.
The 5000-user limit would be hit very quickly.
Hmm, actually, I was on the internet by then, but this was before .com (neyah neyah!)
And I'm 23, but I feel like I'm 80. Anyone remember in Neuromancer when Case felt generation-gapped by the Panther Moderns? It applies.
Too many unrelated bashings in the same post...
and then an ad for the competition????
lemme see if I can guess who YOU work for.
I have a cable modem, and I consistantly get 50-70K/s from cdrom.com, sometimes as high as 100K/s. That's not as fast as some sites, but it's still good.
Man, DX2-66 with a controller board sporting a whopping 4 megs of cache in something like eight or sixteen modules. A long bitch of a card too, I could jam it into the tiny slots on the *front* of my tower, right by the speaker. That was back in the Amiga-envy days. :)
This is completely off-topic, but what would be a compelling reason to swap the SB16+wave I still have from that machine for a SB64? It's been a while since I bought any hardware and I'm getting the itch to get some new stuff.
AC
Well, "IT WILL NEVER BE SLASHDOTTED" you said. It will be hard to slashdot it since this is a very big hardware and a good OS but try to find 5000 users to download the same distro at about the same time and then we may manage to slashdot them ;)
This link has more info on the hardware used by them and the throughput. I have installed FBSD3.1 in 15 min from them.
Slasdot should consider running on FreeBSD 3.1 now that it has reached a respectable readership.
It's called evoultion my simian brothers.
Maybe the server which moves the most data, but sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk has been a 6 ultrasparc machine with ATM and shed loads of RAM for years (the specs on the banner page are out of date). I imagine the other sunsites are similar.
This link has more info on the hardware used by them and the throughput. I have installed FBSD3.1 in 15 min from them.
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/archive-info/wcarchive.txt
Slasdot should consider running on FreeBSD 3.1 now that it has reached a respectable readership.
It's called evoultion my simian brothers.
Ahh, yes. I remember $1800 for a 486SX @ 25MHz and that was the second fastest (33MHz was out but was a bit more) x86 at the time! Ohh, and I'm 19 now! I guess I had a early start...
5000 users (assuming that many actually are using the service at the same time) would come out to be ~20Kb/s (off the top of my head figure)... Even at half that (2500) it's only ~40Kbs! That doesn't sound real great to me.
Man, I'd love to get one of those in a Beowulf cluster. ;)
it can't have more than 2 giagabytes of ram not harddisk.
but that doesn't make it the greatest there is for everything (as some people believe).
Sorry for the question, but what exactly to you mean by being "Slashdotted"?
You can have Linux machines that big. Unlike FreeBSD you can actually get decent SMP performance out of it as well. IMHO it's STUPID to make one big box and put everything on that when you can have a cluster of machines and a layer 4 switch to redirect traffic. It gives you complete redundancy and is much faster than one machine running ANY OS.
I don't know. I like to assemble my computer cuz I can pick the parts, and get warranties on each component, and buy high quality components. Most large computer companies skimp on some components, which is probably why you get the bizarre problems. Flaky hardware can cause wierd stuff to happen, especially a crappy motherboard (with the wierd form factors some companies have, you never known where they get them) and crappy memory.
Being slow is one thing. I could live with slow and steady. But what I hate about ftp.cdrom.com is the way transfers hang for no reason. It can drive you crazy when you are in the middle of a 3 Meg transfer and the suddenly it goes dead. Anxiety! Should I abort? Or should I wait? Will it start again? Aaaarggghhhhh!
This is a Linux box last time I checked. Remember, all these people that go and slashdot other servers aren't overloading /. itself. ;-)
FreeBSD doesn't have any decent clustering support. ;-)
Why would you need 500MHz Xeons with 4 gigs of ram for nodes in a Beowulf cluster? The point is to distribute the processing amongst cheaper nodes. It'd make more sense to use 50 400Mhz Celerons with 64 megs of ram each.
Mirrors of CDROM.com?
Isn't cdrom.com one of the largest mirror sites out there (I mean in that it actually HOSTS mirrors)?
There is a 5000 user limit for a reason, so you can't slashdot it. ;)
;)
Although, I can imagine if you sucked away enough bandwidth you could slow it a little. But I doubt it will ever be "slashdotted."
Especially by a bunch of ignorant Linux users
Linux will destroy FreeBSD. Everybody will use only Linux. Hail Eris!
Only seems to happen to machines running Windows (crashes) and to machines with low to medium bandwidth (slows dows the link).
The 2 gig limit has nothing to do with the processor. It is merely a limit imposed in Linux's ext2 code. BeOS has a 64-bit filesystem which allows up to a terrabyte in size. And yes, this is on the x86 platform.
The Russian Army uses an Intel/Solaris FTP server to distribute all unclassified training and maintance manuals to its forces. The Russian server has been featured on Russian and European news shows as a success story on beating the money crunch under Russia's shakey economy. It is the busiest and fastest FTP server in the world.
I've switched to wget for most downloads now. Just give it the URL and it does the work. If it dies or stalls, just start it up again with -c to continue from where it left off. Works on most http and ftp servers.
I used to be a couple hops away from ftp.cdrom.com but my ISP changed some connections and it is now up to 11. Still get the same speed (whopping 4.8 kb/sec) which is the max for any (compressed) download I've seen.
My phone lines suck. I was considering trying to pull some CAT-5 cable through the wall by tapeing it to the end of the existing phone wires and pulling... Don't have the courage to try that yet. I did notice the previous homeowner who "installed" an air conditioner had looped the @!$*% power line AROUND THE PHONE WIRES! That explains the poor transfer rate when the A/C is on!
I have a question: Why are you spouting off when you obviously don't have anything of substance to say?
> when q3atest is released, they'll go for another reocrd day
What do you mean "WHEN"? It's already been release, TWICE!
I don't think so. Walnut Creek is a commercial CD-ROM publisher. Why should a computer company donate hardware to another for-profit business for free?
This doesn't make sense to me. First of all, the MMU will get remapped when you switch tasks. Secondly, since the process's entire user address space is already mapped in, the only extra you really need mapped in is common kernel data structures and bounce buffers for I/O.
Get a clue, FreeBSD is based from 4.4BSD-lit, is based from Unix version 7, from AT&T.
This must be the third or fourth post where I've seen you spew total Bullshit about Linux. Christ man, why do you hate it so much that you will lie through your teeth about it and take petty crackshots? You can still like your 'FreeBSD' without having to demean Linux. Grow up!
Most of the benchmarks I've seen show that Linux is
/designed/ to perform well under stress :-)
slightly faster than FreeBSD at low system loads,
but that FreeBSD scales much better to high loads.
This is largely a function of the VM architecture,
which was
(analyses I've seen of the Linux VM arch show
that it's optimized for low-end performance and
doesn't scale).
And of course both Linux and FreeBSD shit all over NT
I thought that was a joke . . . .
286-20Mhz (Harris chip), 640K RAM, 40MB MFM hard drive, funky "almost VGA" 640x480 capable VGA card, 13" EGA monitor (that couldn't do the 640x480, only 640x350)... $5,000. And that was a discounted "eval" price, to boot.
10+ years later and only the motherboard survives, though that's running strong. Never did get one of those MMU add-ons for it, ("all charge card"?), the C&T shadow ram stuff gives it UMB's in DOS 5, though...
They don't build 'em like that any more.
Oops... I forgot to mention that although the BSDs are based on V7, they had to take all of the AT&T code out to keep from getting Berkely sued. But it's still real UNIX even though all of the real UNIX code has been replaced, right?
cdrom.com is one of the, if not the, greatest load web sites. They probably want to demonstrate what their stuff can do. So yes it makes sense for them to donate to cdrom.com
I can relate. I broke my teeth on a teletype connected via a 300bps modem to the local "super computer".. I upgraded in '79 to a state of the art Apple ][. With a Panosonic cassette tape recorder and 48k of RAM, I was king of the block! I bought a 5 1/4" diskette drive two years later and rejoiced in the art of "fast saves".
Ah, those were the days. I still have memories of "Pong" dancing in my head. All this at the age of 34.
Based on V7 == Derivative == UNIX.
Linux == Based on Linus != UNIX.
I do not see it in his writting.
There have been quite many times that I have tried to download something from ftp.cdrom.com and they had too many connections. Of course this was a self restriction placed by the ftp server and not some OS crashing, but if that isnt "slashdotting" (which IMO == DOS) it, i dont know what is.
A "rumour" is meaningless with an open-source project. Doesn't even make sense. Read the code. Hell, read the fucking mm readme.
Say someone replaced all of the code written by Linus in the Linux kernel with their own, would they then be able to call it their own OS? I don't think so, and neither does the GPL; it would still be "Linux", even w/o all of Linus' code (more accurately it would be Linux derived, just as FreeBSD is UNIX derived.)
hmm, too late. wcarchive just set a new record yesterday. almost a TB of data sent over the wire -- 969GB to be exact.
THey just set a new record
969 GB in a day
now that's alot
ftp.cdrom.com doesnt need to do fancy database stuff like most web servers, so its not in need of so much CPU space. Their CPU is mostly busy with copying data from HDD (or cache) to network cards and updating the logs on HDD - so theres not so much need for CPU power. I dont think you could run slashdot on the same HW without being slashdotted constantly - the requirements are to different.
I like to be able to compare OSes by their age. Since Linux is about 5 yrs old (Didn't the first realease come out int 1994) and NT is about the same age, or a little older. I think that it's a good sign. However, when everyone says "Linux can't compare with the stability of commercial unices" I just think, well, 5 years ago it didn't even exist. How long before it's network code was anything close to usable? How long before X was on it? etc...
Linus mentioned FreeBSD in an interview with him and he admits (proudly) that Linux is not UNIX. It is POSIX-compliant more or less and supports all the functionality. But as Linus puts it, he doesn't have the legacy of UNIX so he can work in different directions than BSD might.
(BTW, I run FreeBSD as my workstation and it works pretty good).
Great... Just what the world needs, a FreeBSD troll.
Don't get me wrong, FreeBSD's impressive... but any jackass that gets that offensive because someone doesn't agree with him is an asshole.
And, contrary to your belief, hardware DOES fail.
And, of course, remember:
"FreeBlow: The Power to Service."
The Sequent boxes I'm familiar with (both the Balance and the Symmetry) had an active bus between processors.
The upshot of this is that you could access memory belonging to other boards, but it was like using a segment register in an x86 to open a window onto a subset of the memory.
No. Unless you do MIDI stuff, otherwise the cards are functionally the same for wavetable.
http://minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au/PUPS/Images/unixtimeli ne.gif
Linux can't use 4GB of physical RAM on an Alpha or SPARC either, although it can address them using virtual memory (i.e. it does support 4GB+ address space, although not physical RAM yet.)
I still have a couple of Apple ]['s that work, still boot them up every now and then for the old "Beep, clunka-clunka-clunka" sound they make as the floppy drive shudders to life.
Like the "clunk" of an 8-track player changing tracks, there's nothing like the real thing, no matter how well you think you can mike it up and sample it...
I still have a couple of Apple ]['s that work, still boot them up every now and then for the old "Beep... clunka-clunka-clunka" sound they make as the floppy drive shudders to life.
Like the sound of an 8-track player changing tracks, there's nothing like the real thing, no matter how well you think you can mike it up and sample it...
That's a good one.
Ok, now I feel old, I paid $3000 for a new P90 with 16MB RAM, and logged onto CDROM.COM and it had a P100-120 w/512 MB RAM, Wow... Who needed that much memory??? And the max login was about 100 users, and that was never ever met, because everyone was still on BBS's. (My 25th birthday is this weekend, so really, I'm not THAT old...)
Thank goodness there is an alternative. I've had nothing but the best service and the best values from Cheapbytes. There you can find everything from Linux to FreeBSD at bargain prices with top notch service. I will never again waste a nickel on Walnut Creek ripoffs.
If their site maintainer redirected a significant fraction of their traffic to slashdot.org, slashdot's servers would melt into a puddle of metal.
The "slashdot effect" is only impressive because there's never been anything like it before - but in terms of traffic, the slashdot effect is pretty minor compared to what cdrom.com sees.
In short, no.
Excerpt from ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/archive-info/wcarchive.txt
Each month, more than 6 million people visit wcarchive - sending out to them
more than 20 terabytes of files (as of November, 1998), with the only limit being
the Internet backbone(s).
the 2GB limit is not arbitrary; it is due to the design of the present Linux VM code. Basically, the existing VM code tries to avoid MMU reconfigurations when doing I/O by leaving the entire machine's physical ram mapped into every process's address space. Therefore, the amount of virtual memory (i.e. memory that can actually be used by a user process) is reduced from 4GB by the size of the physical RAM.
A 2GB/2GB split is at present the most reasonable configuration for a "large memory" Intel Linux machine.
FreeBSD, on the other hand, requires the occasional (or not so occasional) MMU reconfiguration from within a system call when the memory it needs to do I/O with is not accessable.
MMU reconfigurations can be very expensive. However, this also makes it possible to use up to 4GB of memory on a 32-bit machine.
It would be interesting to see which approach is really more efficient, having not seen any benchmarks I couldn't say.
However, it seems that in the future Linux will do some VM operations the FreeBSD way (this will be necessary to support >4GB with the PPro/Xeon, as you then literally can't map all of physical RAM into a 4GB address space!)
By the way, you can't exceed 2GB RAM on a 64-bit Linux machine either-- unfortunately, these machines are presently tied to _32-bit_ PCI busses, and the kernel doesn't yet do the icky translation necessary to get around this.
(this wouldn't be a problem if you had exclusively 64-bit PCI devices, but no such machines currently exist)
....but what techie would take a store bought over getting to build their own?....
Any techie that manages over a handful of servers! My time is worth too much.
Linux (as far as I know) can't handle more
than 2GB (or is it 1GB?). That's a shame because
FreeBSD evidently can use 4GB (2^32). When
Linus is asked about this memory limitation
of Linux, he typically answers: "Use a 64-bit
processor". IMHO, that's not a good answer.
32-bit architecture is not dead yet. Linus
should consider this limitation as a serious
deficiency of Linux and work on fixing it
rather than saying "Use Alpha". In fact Xeon
memory address bus is probably higher than
32-bit and so a OS running on Xeon should be
able to handle higher than 4GB RAM.
Some friends of mine are network engineers at the facility where wcarchive colocates. It has full-duplex 100MB Fast Ethernet, direct to a backbone router that peers with just about every major network in the same room. Nice. Count me in.
5000 users? They've been running with that many connections for a _long_ time..
Hopefully, they'll get a fatter pipe soon too. (It will be very difficult to convince me that what they have now is adequate, based on previous experiences.)
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for 'linux-2.2.6.tar.gz' (13588897 bytes).
226 Transfer complete.
13588897 bytes received in 607 secs (22 kbytes/sec)
Good thing there are wcarchive mirrors...
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
divided by 5000 users..
= 20000 BITS per second per person.
Not accounting for any overhead at all and assuming 8 bits per byte (much to the dismay of old PDP-8 users I imagine), that's 2.5kbytes/s available, on average, per user.
Anyone getting more than that is incredibly lucky (and is probably slowing the rest of the users down).
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
If it was not a donation I wonder if they had to pay the microsoft tax?
-- I can't say enough in 120 chars!
I've seen it maxed out a few times (at 3600 users). Don't know if that qualilies as having been slashdotted. Perhaps someone with a similar hardware/software/connection setup would allow a test?
Posted by Fleeno:
Is it Slashdotted already?
No it wouldn't. You have access to this part of the address space only when you're in ring 0, i.e. when in kernel code.
OG.
Looks like no one's bitten yet.
FreeBSD, of course!
Uh, haven't you seen adds on other commercial internet things, like WEBSITES? CDROM.COM doesn't sell hardware, so just like other websites do, they can make a buisness decision and accept a hardware add on thier site, the and thier ftp site is obviously a high traffic site. That's why.
But you can't make an Intel linux box with more than 2GB of RAM (and even that requires patches).
The only issue is, that even though you know that these pieces of hardware WORK, you don't know they work together. And yes, when you buy a preassembled PC from a good manufacturer, you DO know exactly what you get.
And warranties are better for a LOT more than just not wanting to open the machine up. I've had many a time where some WEIRD problems showed up and nothing I tried work, but calling tech support fixed it in about 10 minutes. A large computer manufacturer has simply seen it all and can help you with almost anything.
WCarchive is the busiest *public* FTP archive in the world. Who knows what kind of private sites exist out there. Also, there are quite likely *larger* archives out there, though they don't push as much traffic as WC.
I remember when WC took this title away from MS a while ago. The former record had been made by a sizable cluster of machines, all of which ran on faster hardware than cdrom.com . A shining day for open source.
To me, the single greatest argument for using FreeBSD is that WCarchive uses it.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
I remember about four years ago when I was hell-bent on downloading every Doom WAD I could get my grubby little hands on, ftp.cdrom.com seemed to be just a run-of-the-mill server. It was in its infancy -- maximum anonymous users was a measly 240!!
I'm tellin' ya, this makes me feel OLD!
FreeBSD. FreeBSD
Oh, and for the uneducated...
FreeBSD != a linux distribution.
-luqin
---
---
we stand in life at midnight, we are always on the threshold of a new dawn.
I may be misremembering, but I think Sequent had systems with 4GB per NUMA-Q node (and, I suspect, probably allowed each node to access memory in the other nodes) before Xeon Warrior Princess was out.
The MMU trick to handle more than 4GB (not 2GB) of main memory dates back to the Pentium Pro; it wasn't introduced in the Xeons. The support chips for Xeon may have introduced features to handle more than 4GB of physical memory, but that's a different issue (and folks such as Sequent may well have rolled their own support chips).
I almost hate to follow up to this thread since it's been primarily characterized by various people slamming Linux or FreeBSD and I personally hate that (I may be a FreeBSD guy, but I've always enjoyed interacting with you Linux folks), but perhaps I can at least contribute a little light instead of heat to this discussion:
:-)
:-)
:) Not only Red Hat, but Slackware and Debian are available from this box and are both very popular downloads. Once we upgrade our bandwidth and can up the user limit to 10,000 users, I can also forsee the very idea of "user limits" becoming virtually non-applicable to visitors at ftp.cdrom.com and that's a good thing indeed for anyone who's ever been frustrated at being turned away from some popular collection of bits because the site in question has been "slashdotted" by thousands of other eager downloaders.
First off, the machine from Micron was indeed donated to us in exchange for the advertising blurb you see on login and it's a very nice box even though we didn't build it ourselves. We did hand-build the previous box and it also worked just great, the lesson here being that you *can* have a decent system both ways if you're simply careful and well-informed about what you select. The rack case the Micron uses is also very nice and I think we'd have been hard-pressed to put something together which matched this system feature for feature given that some of the components simply aren't available seperately (and even if they were, we do have better things to do than conduct exhaustive hardware searches for each and every piece). Some homebrew box also wouldn't have been donated by a major manufacturer, of course, saving us tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of time, so chew on that for awhile.
Second, it's basically unknown whether or not Linux would be capable of doing the same job in this role since it's simply not been tried, at least not by us. In order to prove it either way, you'd need to create an equivalent site to ftp.cdrom.com and also colocate it at a major backbone where it could pump out 100mbits/sec on a more or less continuous basis (a 1GB upgrade is also planned and awaiting the arrival of more switch hardware).
It's also fair to say that FreeBSD didn't necessarily excel at this task at the very beginning (some 5 years ago) and it was directly through the experience gained with ftp.cdrom.com that we were able to improve FreeBSD to the point where it was able to handle these kinds of loads. I'm sure that if Linux were provided with a similar real-world test bed, it would be similarly improved if and as necessary and I can only suggest that those folks wishing to provide themselves with this kind of Linux showcase machine should go ahead and build one; I'd personally be very interested in seeing the results of such an effort.
We currently pump out more than 800GB per day and I can assure you that this number will only (significantly) increase once we upgrade the bandwidth to 1 gigabit. As you can see by looking at:
http://www.emsphone.com/stats/cdrom.html
We're basically now maxing out the 100Mbit interface with a 5000 user limit (the major dips you see in this graph were the periods when the box was down for major hardware upgrades, e.g. the 1/2 terabyte RAID array and then the Micron upgrade). The box, in both of its incarnations, has very stable but we've yet to master the in-place hardware upgrade.
It's also probably a little-known fact that we pump out at least 10X the number of Red Hat releases that ftp.redhat.com does, so some of the Linux folks throwing stones here should perhaps pause in mid-throw and consider the service this machine provides to both the FreeBSD AND the Linux communities.
ftp.cdrom.com has long been a mecca for people interested in shareware/freeware of all sorts and we aim to keep it that way well into the future. It's not hyperbole when we say it's the biggest, fastest general public FTP archive in the world and we're always interested in new material (M$ might run bigger server farms, but that they cannot say) so please contact us if you have any suggestions for material we should offer there - ftp@ftp.cdrom.com is our "suggestion box" address.
Other URLs of interest:
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/archive-info/wcarchive.jpg
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/config.txt
- Jordan
- Jordan Hubbard co-founder, the FreeBSD Project. Director, UNIX Technology. Apple Computer
The two gig limit is a x86 limit; try putting more then two gigs on a non-xenon system.
:)
Xenon's have a hack to see more then two gigs, and if you take the word of the Linux kernel hackers it's a very ugly hack.
If you want more then two gigs in linux get a Alpha, it's already 64 bit. On the HIGHER end motherboards Alpha has a much better memory subsystem.
I am not a Alpha bigot, I just play one on slashdot.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
Linux servers tend to die under that kind of
load. Matthew Dillon (I think) wrote an article
about how while the Linux VM implementation is
simpler, it just cannot handle serious loads.
Actually, I think this is the only one where
I lied through my teeth. Let me reread my other
responses to be sure.
Ya, I checked, this was it.
Duh.
Saturday, May 1st, 1999 1:20 PM CST
Welcome to wcarchive - home FTP site for Walnut Creek CDROM.
There are currently 4993 users out of 5000 possible.
$ ftp ftp.cdrom.com
Connected to wcarchive.cdrom.com.
220 wcarchive.cdrom.com FTP server (Version DG-3.1.27 Wed Dec 2 01:29:08 PST 1998) ready.
Name (ftp.cdrom.com:[deleted]): ftp
331 Guest login ok, send your email address as password.
Password:
230-Welcome to wcarchive - home FTP site for Walnut Creek CDROM.
230-There are currently 4399 users out of 5000 possible.
230-
230-Most of the files in this area are also available on CDROM. You can send
230-email to info@cdrom.com for more information or to order, or visit our Web
230-site at http://www.cdrom.com. For tech support about our products, please
230-email support@cdrom.com. You may also call our toll-free number:
230-1-800-786-9907 or +1-925-674-0783. Please keep in mind that we only offer
230-technical support for our CDROM products and not for the files on our
230-FTP server.
230-
230-This machine is a Xeon/500 with 4GB of memory & 1/2 terabyte of RAID 5.
230-The operating system is FreeBSD. Should you wish to get your own copy of
230-FreeBSD, see the pub/FreeBSD directory or visit http://www.freebsd.org
230-for more information. FreeBSD on CDROM can be ordered using the WEB at
230-http://www.cdrom.com/titles/os/freebsd.htm or by sending email to
230-orders@cdrom.com.
230-
230-Slow downloads? Please see ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/archive-info/slow.txt
230-for more information.
230-
230-100Mbps colocation services provided by CRL Network Services. For more
230-information, please visit http://www.crl.com.
230-
230-Server machine provided by Micron Electronics. Please visit
230-http://www.micronpc.com.
230-
230-Please send mail to ftp-bugs@ftp.cdrom.com if you experience any problems.
230-Please also let us know if there is something we don't have that you think
230-we should!
230-
230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp>
They probably didn't give credit to the PC Manufacturer before because from the looks of the old pics, it looked generic. I assume the last was a frankenstein machine build up. I guess they didn't feel like slappin another together this time 'round and picked up a Micron. Personally I like puttin together my PC, part of the fun..., but for biz use I generally like to buy the kind that's already put together..generally takes some hassle out of the process.
-Booya "No Try Not. Do or do not, there is no try." -Yoda
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I'd be more than happy to take the old machine off their hands.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
It's actually a sort of in-joke now, it's usually something like: "Imagine what kind of 3L33T Beowulf cluster you could build with those". It's been said for everything from supercomputers to matchbox servers.
Basically it's a troll, of the cute variety like you see in alt.folklore.urban from time to time.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
ftp.cdrom.com has upgraded from 1Gb to 2Gb RAM, not disk...
:))
A processor with a 32-bit address-bus should technically could address 2^32 bytes of memory (4 Gb). But Linux won't do more than 2Gb or so on a 32-bit processor. Rumour has it that it's because they've used signed integers, but I don't think Linus would have made such an amatour-code. Kinda of remindes me of Bill Gates: "Noone will ever need more than 640k RAM!"
"The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages." - Tao of Programming
Good businesses like this deserve to get your business.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Sheesh... I remember playing Castle Wolfentstein and connecting to BBS's at 300bps with an acoustic coupler.
I had a VT-52 terminal and a 300bps modem, and I was hot stuff. That was in addition to my 8-bit Atari and Altos CP/M machine. sigh Those were the days!
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
well, there is also the OS consideration in mind... personally, i'm under NT right now and I'm on a pII400 with 128MB RAM and its pretty quick... I wouldn't mind doing a speed comparison between this and Linux but their not even comparable...
I mean, windows is windows and you've got all your great programs for it and everything but then you go to linux and you've got about the same amount of programs but only 1/4 of those are GUI... and about 10% of those 1/4 are decently built programs
sorry, i still think x programs look like crap... personally, i don't think it'd hurt if someone learnt from windows in building their programs - they are pretty much the standard out right now and it wouldn't hurt if people designed programs like they do in windows... i think it'd actually help the spread of linux...
if you need a comparison, take forte' agent as an example... it's a newsreader program that is set up nearly perfectly (in my opinion)... now you can't get anywhere NEAR that in a linux/x program in looks or useability... every single program that i look at for x that someone suggests are just plain ugly and have some sort of useless GUI abilities...
ok, thats enough ripping on linux programs... sorry for any offense created, but hey - you guys are the one thats trying to get away from windows and not look back when in reality you should do as they did and steal ideas from other OS's and include it in your own... its not WRONG, its just what people are used to so they'll WANT to use it... this is kind of the reason i want to try KDE, it looks pretty good...
8Complex
you're probably pretty right about that... unless, of course, they ordered from micron exactly what they wanted on it and just let them put it together and warantee it... after all, they had to put their own OS on there (micron do freebsd? forget it... they might THINK about linux, but not freebsd)
:-)
so i'm assuming that that machine will be killer for them... i've seen them break gb/day limits over the last year or two, and always being full... personally, i am willing to stick out my neck and say that that is the MOST used FTP server on the web. I think (and thi is if my memory serves me correct) that their record is sending out 359GB in a day... i could be wrong though... (you'd think that they'd display it somewhere)
think about this one... when q3atest is released, they'll go for another reocrd day there... i wanna see those stats
8Complex
hmmmmmmm... well personally i don't really consider hard drive a hardware upgrade for an FTP like that... its more of a storage expansion...
personally, i'd love to log in and just look around... there's so much stuff on that site i can never see it all - i don't even know everything that it covers... all i've seen is the game archive for id and a few of the addon directories...
8Complex
Connection from east to west (US) or vice versa is slower because there is a bottle neck of sorts. I believe I read this somewhere on their page.
> BTW, FreeBSD 3.1-RELEASE *cannot* go all the way to 4 GB without some serious tuning, so there you have.
Depends on what you consider "serious tuning". You need to grab a recent version of the boot loader (e.g. off of a recent FreeBSD 3.1-STABLE or 4.0-CURRENT installation floppy) and make three rather trivial modifications to the kernel source, as described in section 13.15 of the FAQ.
4.0-CURRENT as of late February (or eraly March) and 3.1-STABLE as of late April support large memory configurations out of the box.
Note that if you patch a 3.1-RELEASE system to support large memory configurations, you will lose BSD/OS binary compatibility. This has been fixed in 4.0-CURRENT and 3.1-STABLE.
..you would have read that, and I quote:
"This machine is a Xeon/500 with 4GB of memory & 1/2 terabyte of RAID 5.
The operating system is FreeBSD. Should you wish to get your own copy of
FreeBSD, see the pub/FreeBSD directory or visit http://www.freebsd.org
for more information. FreeBSD on CDROM can be ordered using the WEB at
http://www.cdrom.com/titles/os/freebsd.htm or by sending email to
orders@cdrom.com."
010110000010110101010100011110010111000001100101
Anyone know what it's running?
I read that message, but for some reason I must've missed that part about FreeBSD. My bad.
I'm thinking that the credit is there because Micron gave them the equipment. Just like they're probably getting the colo service from CRL for free. What do you think?
Get off my launchpad!
last fall, the disk space was upgraded to half a terabyte, so it really isnt the first upgrade in 2 years.
I don't know what's up with Slashdot readers crying 'Beowulf' whenever they see something that needs CPU juice...
:)
***Beowulf clusters are only good for _certain_ types of parallel computing problems*** (coarsely grained problems are what it's for...throw something too finely grained at it, and it kills itself with internode communication latency) No more talk of a Beowulf Quake
CJK
Maybe I'm just totally missing something there, but your numbers seem to make no sense whatsoever (especially since your required bandwidth figure was twice as big at 2500 users vs. 5000). It's like this:
- pretend everyone was connected at 28.8 kbps
- this is 3.6 K (kilobytes, not bits) per second
- if there are 5000 people @ 3.6 K/second:
5000 * 3600 bytes/sec = 18,000,000 bytes/sec = 17.17 megabytes/sec
This is also operating under the fallacy that everyone is on at 28.8 kbps...there will still be some 14.4's...but also lots of 56 kbps...and then lots of people on faster (perhaps from work) links. Heck, I have 1.54 Mbps (T1) in my apartment....just 12 people like me and you're already sucking up more bandwidth than 5000 people @ 28.8...
CJK
I was surprised to read that a site with as much traffic as cdrom.com was running on one machine with one CPU.
I guess the importance of processor speed is overblown by the media and Intel press releases and not enough attention is given to the importance of lots of RAM and fast hard drives.
Does anyone know what version of FreeBSD they are running?
#include "mysig.h"
.. a single zeon makes a kick-ass server, but in the mindshaft testing lab you need a quad zeon! Hmmm.. of course it _was_ optimized for NT - probably the logic was that with 4 cpus running NT, then at any time ONE of them might actually be working!
Remember that X is just the low level graphics library - it's what's on top of it (the low level and desktop environment widgets and dialogs) that contribute to an app's look and feel. The currently popular widget sets and environments - qt/KDE and gtk/GNOME are still very young, but improving very fast. Remember that Windows itself was essentially useless until 3.0, and the UI was unusable until Windows '95...
Remember that the current Linux user base is only in the 12-15 million range, but growing _very_ fast. Mexican schools are adopting Linux/GNOME, and China is likely to be predominantly Linux too for cost reasons (it already has a pretty large Linux user base, and there's only just been released a Chinese version of Linux!)... as the desktop user base grows, there's going to be some very rapid advances...
I used to love correcting punch card mistakes using the duplicate button - sounded like a freakin' machine gun! :)
Erm, sorry, but I was out Red Hat 6.0 hunting just a couple of days ago when every ftp site on the planet that mirrors Red Hat was getting smashed, and the too many users error I got from ftp.cdrom.com said 3500.
Of course provided by = free. Who in the hell would waste their money on a micron? Yes I hate them and am totally biased but what techie would take a store bought over getting to build their own?
:)
I wonder what happened to the old server? I think it should become my graduation present.
~Kevin
Good try troll, but I did't buy it ;)
Not that I think you ever contributed to anythig
useful.
Beeing an anonymous poster on Slashdot is your faith.
Show me the links and numbers please.
This sounds interesting. I haven't heard about it thou.