HTTP auth is a standard. Nagios uses it. This is Good.
I recently merged three web applications we have, one of them being Nagios, to use a single htpasswd file, and control access to the different areas by htgroup.
Bug all free web software writers to support HTTP auth as an option, at minimum.
not documented well on the site, last I checked, but the reason is:
It reacts to things professionally:
It keeps track of downtimes. It lets you SCHEDULE downtime (for specific time windows). It has access controls by user. It has limited views by user. It has notification windows per user.
STuff like that. BigBrother doesnt come close. and MRTG has a completely different design goal, as far as I understand it.
nagios is designed to be a cheap man's replacement for full on HP OpenView, in a true 24x7 NOC.
spoken like someone who believes in benchmarks too much. There have already been posts by people who have specific examples of where solaris outperforms linux and BSD. (mainly in threading cases).
Not to mention that you are misusing the phrase "scales". Yes, linux has lower latency times in many categories. Thats because it is designed to be a desktop/narrow focus OS. That makes it faster on smaller machines, for quite a few purposes. However, that doesnt make it "scale better" than solaris. Just the opposite.
One definition of "scales" is "can run on bigger machines". Obviously, solaris has linux beat. But another definition is "can handle large loads well". Solaris handles those well too, because that is what it is *designed for*. Whereas linux is designed for low latency, non-max-loaded systems. Which means that after a certain point, linux tanks, whereas solaris degrades more gracefully under load.
This is one of those things that really gets me. If Sun was really worried about stability and security, they'd be giving it away for the masses to put through the ringer.
You have it exactly backwards. Solaris itself is ALREADY more stable than the average "distro".
Now on the other hand, there are certain solaris x86 drivers that definitely need improving. But Sun being a commercial entity, they tend to get improved when money comes in to improve them. EG: You BUY A SUPPORT CONTRACT, and file a bug.
Informative? How does this article rate "informative"?
There is no actual INFORMATION given. Just a vague claim.
" If you can do the comparison on a small machine 2 or 4 cpus, you'll see that bsd or linux are faster."
Faster at what? Terminal velocity,, after throwing the machine out of a hi-rise window?
(Meaningless Index of Plummeting Speed)
How much faster?
In all cases, in all configurations, or "Well, I tested it on my 64megs of RAM desktop, and linux runs faster, d00d!"
There are configurations where Solaris x86 is slower. There are configurations where Solaris x86 is comparable. There are hardware+load configurations where Solaris x86 is FASTER.
I guess your problem was in trying to support linux yourselves with the GPL driver. You should have just released the source, said, "This is unsupported", and then refused to take any support calls for linux.
you then have nice limited support costs when it comes to linux.
Has anyone ever been to a speedy Java based site? All the sites I've gone to that look like they're Java based seem painfully slow.
How do you judge something "looks like it is java based" ??
Unless you see *.jsp all over the place, you will have no idea. And note that jsp pages are not the be-all end-all of java servlet based webhosting. They are in fact a special case of java on the server side (and a case that makes it more like php to develop: dynamic, cached auto-compilation by the server when you change the page)
Re:Seems like a silly move...
on
Yahoo Moving to PHP
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So don't use FreeBSD. Use Linux. Or eventually move to an OS that has really good thread support; even if it's not free,
Solaris is big, slow, and clunky, not because it is big, slow, and clunky at everything, but because it is big, slow, and clunky at those tasks most people perform most of the time.
That is half true.
It is true in that many people have compared solaris to linux, and found solaris to be slower. However, that is because solaris comes tuned for reliability over speed, out of the box.
If you enable DMA for the ATA drive the user is using, plus run "fastfs" on all the filesystems to turn off nice safe slow sync-to-disk in various places, it will run just as fast as linux.
The primary drawback to solaris vs linux/etc is fewer drivers for solaris. Related to that, is that linux 3d graphics support is better. But that will change.
wrong.
For example, when you have a situation where you have lame hardware/drivers that do a lot of busywaits. With a single-cpu system, your system will be completely idle under that situation, no matter what speed cpu you have. Whereas with a dual cpu system, you will be able to get other work done.
Do you consider yourself primarily an "Open Source" programmer, a "GNU" programmer, or a "Linux-only" programmer?
If you consider yourself an "Open Source" programmer, how do you justify your stance on withholding your driver code from proprietary OSes, since truely "Open" source, lets people use the source code for whatever they want?
I don't think this is true. There is always somebody that will find any given problem interesting. If not, it probably wasn't worth doing.
So a free, fully functional word processor was not worth doing? for 10-20 years?
OpenOffice is the only fully functional one fitting the bill, and it is only open now, because someone PAID a lot of people a lot of money to write a non-free product, that then got re-released.
There was a clear and obvious need for one, for an extended period of time, but noone had enough interest (and time) to make it happen as a free software project.
The closest stuff were things like "EZ" (from the Andrew project) which people "got by" on. their(the writers') need was filled, so it never progressed further.
Solaris perl is built with Sun's C compiler, and this perl version cannot be extended by gcc. If you lack Sun cc and you need to extend perl, then you must reinstall in a separate location and then manage two installations.
Err, no, you just need to know enough perl, to know that you need to hunt down and adjust Config.pm to use gcc and corresponding flags instead of the default SunCC stuff.
Yeup. And I know of.. umm... "a company out there" that just bought a 15k with 72 CPUs, to run an application server for the backend of their core website. I suspect they may end up throwing the extra CPUs in there eventually, too:-}
If you can loose a server without too much trouble, by all means use software RAID. I've seen many kernel panics, but never a RAID controller fail without help.
your problem is that you're confusuing "Software RAID on Linux", with "Software RAID in all cases".
Since your experience is with unreliable software RAID, you assume that hardware RAID is always preferable.
I know people like software raid, but a hardware raid that I can trust to keep working even when the kernel panics is a real asset.
For a box with lots of drives, sure. But for a box that will have basically a mirrored root drive, there's no point.
Even if there is "mirrored root", and "mirrored application", thats a total of 4 drives, with simple RAID1 mirroring... not much point.
So much bullshit. First, if you want to learn Slowlaris, you need to use sparc hardware.
As someone who has passed all three Solaris sysadmin certification levels, I can tell you that it is possible to learn Solaris very well, JUST using x86. I happen to also have learned on sparc, buthaving gone through the tests, I can tell you that wasnt required.
What IS highly useful, however, is having multiple solaris systems to network with, to learn stuff.
The manpower wasted in maintaining/supporting a solaris box as compared to that in comparing a (apt-get) linux box makes the former just not worth it for us.
a pkg-get workalike, that can be configured to download either "companion CD" packages, or sunfreeware packages. I prefer to configure it to point to companion CD packages, because they actually have dependancies, so then it really works like apt-get.
Slashdot Mirror
My personal take on this:
Standards are Good.
HTTP auth is a standard. Nagios uses it. This is Good.
I recently merged three web applications we have, one of them being Nagios, to use a single htpasswd file, and control access to the different areas by htgroup.
Bug all free web software writers to support HTTP auth as an option, at minimum.
not documented well on the site, last I checked, but the reason is:
It reacts to things professionally:
It keeps track of downtimes. It lets you SCHEDULE downtime (for specific time windows). It has access controls by user. It has limited views by user. It has notification windows per user.
STuff like that. BigBrother doesnt come close. and MRTG has a completely different design goal, as far as I understand it.
nagios is designed to be a cheap man's replacement for full on HP OpenView, in a true 24x7 NOC.
I've seen someone report on the sage mailing list that they were using nagios to monitor 500 hosts, with a total of around 1800 services.
spoken like someone who believes in benchmarks too much. There have already been posts by people who have specific examples of where solaris outperforms linux and BSD. (mainly in threading cases).
Not to mention that you are misusing the phrase "scales". Yes, linux has lower latency times in many categories. Thats because it is designed to be a desktop/narrow focus OS. That makes it faster on smaller machines, for quite a few purposes. However, that doesnt make it "scale better" than solaris. Just the opposite.
One definition of "scales" is "can run on bigger machines". Obviously, solaris has linux beat. But another definition is "can handle large loads well". Solaris handles those well too, because that is what it is *designed for*. Whereas linux is designed for low latency, non-max-loaded systems. Which means that after a certain point, linux tanks, whereas solaris degrades more gracefully under load.
so what is Solaris x86 missing? Honestly all it needs is a god community packaging effort.
Well then, if you think that, and are willing to put in a little shared time yourself, come join in the fun!
You have it exactly backwards. Solaris itself is ALREADY more stable than the average "distro".
Now on the other hand, there are certain solaris x86 drivers that definitely need improving. But Sun being a commercial entity, they tend to get improved when money comes in to improve them. EG: You BUY A SUPPORT CONTRACT, and file a bug.
" If you can do the comparison on a small machine 2 or 4 cpus, you'll see that bsd or linux are faster."
Faster at what? Terminal velocity,, after throwing the machine out of a hi-rise window? (Meaningless Index of Plummeting Speed) How much faster?
In all cases, in all configurations, or "Well, I tested it on my 64megs of RAM desktop, and linux runs faster, d00d!"
There are configurations where Solaris x86 is slower. There are configurations where Solaris x86 is comparable. There are hardware+load configurations where Solaris x86 is FASTER.
I guess your problem was in trying to support linux yourselves with the GPL driver. You should have just released the source, said, "This is unsupported", and then refused to take any support calls for linux.
you then have nice limited support costs when it comes to linux.
That should read, "In American, yes. In English, no".
How do you judge something "looks like it is java based" ??
Unless you see *.jsp all over the place, you will have no idea. And note that jsp pages are not the be-all end-all of java servlet based webhosting. They are in fact a special case of java on the server side (and a case that makes it more like php to develop: dynamic, cached auto-compilation by the server when you change the page)
Like solaris x86 perhaps!
java is primarily designed for solaris,after all.
Hint: If you need it, xfree86 2d driver support runs exactly the same on solaris as it does on linux/bsd/xyz
That is half true.
It is true in that many people have compared solaris to linux, and found solaris to be slower. However, that is because solaris comes tuned for reliability over speed, out of the box.
If you enable DMA for the ATA drive the user is using, plus run "fastfs" on all the filesystems to turn off nice safe slow sync-to-disk in various places, it will run just as fast as linux.
The primary drawback to solaris vs linux/etc is fewer drivers for solaris. Related to that, is that linux 3d graphics support is better. But that will change.
wrong. For example, when you have a situation where you have lame hardware/drivers that do a lot of busywaits. With a single-cpu system, your system will be completely idle under that situation, no matter what speed cpu you have. Whereas with a dual cpu system, you will be able to get other work done.
Assuming you have a decent OS, of course.
If you consider yourself an "Open Source" programmer, how do you justify your stance on withholding your driver code from proprietary OSes, since truely "Open" source, lets people use the source code for whatever they want?
So a free, fully functional word processor was not worth doing? for 10-20 years?
OpenOffice is the only fully functional one fitting the bill, and it is only open now, because someone PAID a lot of people a lot of money to write a non-free product, that then got re-released.
There was a clear and obvious need for one, for an extended period of time, but noone had enough interest (and time) to make it happen as a free software project. The closest stuff were things like "EZ" (from the Andrew project) which people "got by" on. their(the writers') need was filled, so it never progressed further.
reasonable idea, wrong place. /usr/local is from www.sunfreeware.com, NOT "the companion cd".
stuff that installs to
Sun support for "SunONE" stuff like directory server, will allegedly be added piecemeal.
directory server will be the first thing added.
Err, no, you just need to know enough perl, to know that you need to hunt down and adjust Config.pm to use gcc and corresponding flags instead of the default SunCC stuff.
Yeup. And I know of .. umm... "a company out there" that just bought a 15k with 72 CPUs, to run an application server for the backend of their core website. :-}
I suspect they may end up throwing the extra CPUs in there eventually, too
your problem is that you're confusuing "Software RAID on Linux", with "Software RAID in all cases". Since your experience is with unreliable software RAID, you assume that hardware RAID is always preferable.
I dont have that problem: I use Solaris.
For a box with lots of drives, sure. But for a box that will have basically a mirrored root drive, there's no point. Even if there is "mirrored root", and "mirrored application", thats a total of 4 drives, with simple RAID1 mirroring... not much point.
Yes it is.
Not only is it code-compatible at the application level, but it is code-compatible for many DRIVERS as well.
A well-known example: ip-filter.
As someone who has passed all three Solaris sysadmin certification levels, I can tell you that it is possible to learn Solaris very well, JUST using x86. I happen to also have learned on sparc, buthaving gone through the tests, I can tell you that wasnt required.
What IS highly useful, however, is having multiple solaris systems to network with, to learn stuff.
Apparently, you havent discovered pkg-get
a pkg-get workalike, that can be configured to download either "companion CD" packages, or sunfreeware packages. I prefer to configure it to point to companion CD packages, because they actually have dependancies, so then it really works like apt-get.