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.
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?"
Most Micron components are off the shelf items. Micron memory is some of the best. They use Micronics motherboards which I think are home grown models.
-- I can't say enough in 120 chars!
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.
Habit, I think, is the real reason. When cdrom was first up, there was no real competition. FreeBSD was infinitely better than Linux for servers. Nowadays, with linux 2.2, it's not that clear. But for now freebsd is more than good enough, and changing would surely cost them a lot without winning much if anything.
Anyone has serious benchmarks comparing the latest freebsd and linux kernels ? I think it would be interesting if done seriously, especially in the networking area.
OG.
Looks like no one's bitten yet.
Started with an Apple ][+ with 48k, then an IBM PC (Yes, the original). Then a Zenith laptop with a 20 MB hard drive (Whoopee!) then a AMD 386 DX-40, 486 DX2-66, Pentium 120, and now a AMD K6 300. I think I still liked the Apple the best tho ;) Oh, yeah, I also had an Atari "VCS". That's what they called it before they renamed it to the "2600". It even had a "BASIC" cartridge that let you write programs. Couldn't save them though!
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).
That's where Micron and Dell differ :)
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
WCarchive is the busiest *public* FTP archive in the world. Who knows what kind of private sites exist out there.
How many private sites could have enough traffic to regularly max out 3600 users? Even for a heavily used server, that takes at least 36,000 people using it. Only a large company or small government serving everything off one server could reach that.
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."
You can, but it costs too much compared to the
current set up. I think I heard that previous
machines were donated (I have not heard about
the current).
Sometimes you have to work with what you have,
and usually FreeBSD can kick penguin ass if
"what you have" has to do a lot.
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.
Funny... I spent the same amount for the same computer, except I got a 700Meg drive...
As a side note, this computer is still in use (though upgraded to an AMD 5x86 133 (OC to 160), and a second 5G drive (new controller).. Its a good IPMASQ machine and small server..
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
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.
I got 250-350 k when downloading rh5.2. That is the fastest i've done with my cablemodem.
Actually, the login limit is 5000 since the upgrade, and was 3600 for a long time before that.
For naked, unadultered throughput and usage figures, go see http://www.emsphone.com/stats/cdrom.html.
> 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
Oh wow, it was on Russian news! Well, it certainly must be true, then!
Russian news and news feeds should be taken with a pound or two of salt. I don't doubt that they have an ftp server, but it's prolly not the fastest in the world. 'Sides, with their money crunch, how many ppl over there (civilians and military) have computers anyway?
--Andrew Grossman
grossdog@dartmouth.edu
I read that message, but for some reason I must've missed that part about FreeBSD. My bad.
But it is one of the great Open Source Projects
New things are always on the horizon
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
LOL, I bought that exact same configuration with a 1 meg video card and a "huge" 15" monitor. I got it specifically to run OS/2 v2.1. I still remember the sales guy mention what a power user system I was getting... and I used to get all my OS/2 shareware off of ftp.cdrom.com not too long after that.
Slashdot had
this just last week.
Actually FreeBSD = REAL UNIX
Linux = UNIX CLONE
FreeBSD is based on 386BSD. Linux is something Linus dreamed of when he realized that Minix's licence sucked, so he wrote a clone and GPL'd it. Minix is a clone of Unix, so Linux is actually a clone of a clone. However, more companies are starting to port their software to linux than to FreeBSD. Besides, Linux makes a good PC, FreeBSD makes a good server, any questions?
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Almost every time I go to ftp.cdrom.com, I get the "Sorry, we've reached our limit of 3000 users" message. That place is bizzzzzy.
And I don't think it would have any problems with bandwidth... I believe they've broken their own GB/day transfer records a couple of times now.
I have to say, by the subject of your message I thought you were going to suggest pointing the slashdot effect at that NT cluster in Redmond! :-)
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"
So now it's Linux against the world not just MS? Any good alternative OS is a welcome thing and FreeBSD is obviously as good as they come. Walnut Creek must choose to run FreeBSD over Slackware for a reason.
#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! :)
FreeBSD != REAL Unix. Its not based off of the AT&T source, FreeBSD inc. does not own the UNIX trademark. FreeBSD is a unix clone, the only difference was that they started it 15 years ago instead of 9.
That does not make it better. If you just add the x86 bits to the BSD-lite 4.4 source tree, you're going to be in for a nasty surprise.
If it was based off of the source from AT&T, it wouldn't be freely redistributable.
Its just a re-implmentation of unix.
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
I still have my TRS-80 model circa 1979-80, 4k of memory, cassette tape drive for program installs. I remember when it was cool to type in a 4k game when the Radio Shack monthly mag came out. Could you imagine trying to type in Quake II :) No speakers accept the internal squeaker. I have an old VT 100 and vt 220 that still work and even an old dual 8inch floppy drive. yipes and I am only 32.
Good try troll, but I did't buy it ;)
FreeBSD doesn't have any decent clustering support. ;-)
Yeah, and Yahoo is a single machine. He, he.
Of course you can do clustering on FreeBSD. As the above poster said,
it hasn't been any great interest in it but I know there are some projects.
None as high profile as the Beowulf thou.
FreeBSD has been focusing on trying to get best possible performance on
the most commonly used platform. That's been x86 up to now.
So that you can run a high traffic porn site like persian kitty, a buisy ftp server like cdrom.com,
big web servicing like yahoo or a unix workstation like mine on "lousy hardware".
What will be the most common platform in the future I don't know, but FreeBSD will be there.
There are also a Alpha port for FreeBSD but it is "alpha".
Now that there are a lot of attention towards Linux and the money are pouring in from the big guys,
it is sad that some linux users are bashing BSD when they are getting good press.
Your point beeing that FreeBSD sux, right ;)
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.
I think he was talking about RAM/disk.
(8-DCS)
Non-sense. The ability to effectively use 4 GB of RAM is related to memory bandwidth, which is *not* related to word size (these systems do use more than 32 bits for memory transfers).
:-) BTW, FreeBSD 3.1-RELEASE *cannot* go all the way to 4 GB without some serious tuning, so there you have.
I think your problem is one of envy...
(8-DCS)
I think we are comparing oranges and tangerines here. Linux and Free BSD are very similar in theory. While FreeBSD is a little more mature when it comes to the enterprise, Linux is a little more scalable (both up AND down), and is now aiming towards enterprise use.
BOTH do a better job the NT, and cost much less..
It comes down to preference. Every OS has its pros and cons. Linux is middle of the road in usabilty. A compromise between the 'supposed' easy to use GUI of NT, which has still yet to be proven in the enterprise, and the raw power of unix (FreeBSD, HP/UX, Solaris, AIX, etc.)
It comes down to the fact that if you have enough resources, you can do anything.