I think you're probably right. There's a lot of attraction to the "underdogs" and now that Linux is another 900 pound gorilla, I don't think anybody can rightly call it an underdog anymore.:)
And to the person who said that people make more permanent choices than this and don't just go for the protest vote, well, c'mon. Jesse Ventura is governor of Minnesota! Enough said.:-)
ISO images for -current are already widely available and have been for some time. Just go to current.freebsd.org and look in pub/FreeBSD/ISO - snapshots are available for both x86 and Alpha.
Yeesh, what could be simpler?
Re:Trolls of insufficient quality [Re:BSD is dying
on
Storm Linux
·
· Score: 1
Urk, I hate to reply to myself, but whoops - looks like www.freebsdcon.com hasn't cleared the NIC yet so please use http://www.freebsdcon.org instead for now. They'll both point to the same place shortly.:)
Trolls of insufficient quality [Re:BSD is dying]
on
Storm Linux
·
· Score: 1
Bah. Why does this exact (almost word-for-word) paragraph about BSD and WC's impending death seem to pop up with such monotonous regularity? Are the trolls so bereft of new material that they've been reduced to form-letter trolls?:-)
Needless to say, Walnut Creek CDROM is still very much in business and probably selling more FreeBSD than ever before. FreeBSD has been doing so well that we're even putting on our first conference this year, and I can tell you that such exercises ain't cheap. See http://www.freebsdcon.com for more information on that, and I guess I should thank this troll for giving me an excellent opportunity for a plug as well!:-)
Walnut Creek CDROM also isn't technically for sale unless you have a really big pile of money, of course, in which case by all means let's talk. Like all high-tech companies, the idea of merger or sale for the kind of $$$ which would enable them to get to the next size threshold isn't exactly a new or manifestly unwelcome one.
Welcome to the real world, your trollness, and I'm sorry that you're so clearly unable to deal with it.:)
No offense, but I think Perry simply needs to sync-up with the Apple folks again on what they're doing in BSD land. Their strategies have changed a bit in the last few months and some of it has involved doing exactly what Perry seems to feel would be "an immense pain" (I haven't heard any screaming, let's put it that way:-).
Wilfredo Sanchez from Apple will be giving a talk on this topic at the USENIX annual technical conference in just a couple of weeks here (see http://www.usenix.org) and those folks who wish to get their information from the horse's mouth, so to speak, should simply attend his talk. It's just one more reason to go to USENIX this year.:)
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:
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.:) 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.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're probably right. There's a lot of attraction to the "underdogs" and now that Linux is another 900 pound gorilla, I don't think anybody can rightly call it an underdog anymore. :)
:-)
And to the person who said that people make more permanent choices than this and don't just go for the protest vote, well, c'mon. Jesse Ventura is governor of Minnesota! Enough said.
ISO images for -current are already widely available and have been for some time. Just go to current.freebsd.org and look in pub/FreeBSD/ISO - snapshots are available for both x86 and Alpha.
Yeesh, what could be simpler?
Urk, I hate to reply to myself, but whoops - looks like www.freebsdcon.com hasn't cleared the NIC yet so please use http://www.freebsdcon.org instead for now. They'll both point to the same place shortly. :)
Bah. Why does this exact (almost word-for-word) paragraph about BSD and WC's impending death seem to pop up with such monotonous regularity? Are the trolls so bereft of new material that they've been reduced to form-letter trolls? :-)
:-)
:)
Needless to say, Walnut Creek CDROM is still very much in business and probably selling more FreeBSD than ever before. FreeBSD has been doing so well that we're even putting on our first conference this year, and I can tell you that such exercises ain't cheap. See http://www.freebsdcon.com for more information on that, and I guess I should thank this troll for giving me an excellent opportunity for a plug as well!
Walnut Creek CDROM also isn't technically for sale unless you have a really big pile of money, of course, in which case by all means let's talk. Like all high-tech companies, the idea of merger or sale for the kind of $$$ which would enable them to get to the next size threshold isn't exactly a new or manifestly unwelcome one.
Welcome to the real world, your trollness, and I'm sorry that you're so clearly unable to deal with it.
No offense, but I think Perry simply needs to sync-up with the Apple folks again on what they're doing in BSD land. Their strategies have changed a bit in the last few months and some of it has involved doing exactly what Perry seems to feel would be "an immense pain" (I haven't heard any screaming, let's put it that way :-).
:)
Wilfredo Sanchez from Apple will be giving a talk on this topic at the USENIX annual technical conference in just a couple of weeks here (see http://www.usenix.org) and those folks who wish to get their information from the horse's mouth, so to speak, should simply attend his talk. It's just one more reason to go to USENIX this year.
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