Groovy.
Better go check the load average on the head samba box. The main pkg_dist box gets busy around this time of night - darned cron driven rsyncs prior to backup...
Good chatting with a non-newbie. It's a change around here;-)
Too right, they aren't as thin as they could be, but they're as thin as they need to be.
Sure, you get great street cred to have everything netboot, but it was quicker to use the HDD the 60 boxes had in them.
A CDROM boot is nice, but you need 60 discs, and need to burn 60 every time you update workstations(yearly - bad point, I know...).
We haven't had to administer these machines in 2.5 years. Not even a login.
The last update(XFree 4.3.0_8), was undetected by users, but it happened...
One day, yeah, netboot would be fun!
TFTP the kernel, mount read-only/,/usr over NFS, read/write/tmp,/var either to server, or ram disks...it'd be fun.
But there's work to be done. bugger. no time for play...
It's such a shame you've had such a bitter personal experience with FreeBSD, and I honestly feel sorry for you.
We timed the installation of the template workstation:
Bios config(boot from CD), bare iron FreeBSD install from CD, Networking to DHCP, XFree86 installed, configged to auto-start XFree86(su to non-root user, run X, rdesktop command in.xinitrc)
Time taken: 28 minutes(ish)
We've only had good experiences with FreeBSD - that's why we use it for all non-Microsoft dependent services.
I'm not wanting to flame bait, but if you think it 'sucks an ass', spend a little time taking another look, learn the ports system, learn portupgrade, pkg_*, see the beauty in/etc/rc.*, and/usr/local/etc/*, and read:
man hier, man tuning, man firewall
I used Linux when the whole thing fitted on one 3.5" DD (720k) - about kernel 1.0.2(I think). Since then I've managed(and still do) systems running Caldera, RedHat, SuSe, Mandrake, and Scyld Beowulf Linux...They're nice, they work, but they're no FreeBSD.
Why Linux-based thin clients?
We already run FreeBSD-based thin clients (with W2K TS)
Each FBSD station automatically checks it's departmental samba box(doing NFS shares as well) for updates every night, and installs them automatically.
(We put the new packages on samba boxes once we've tested them...)
(Command to upgrade: ls -1 | xargs pkg_upgrade)
FreeBSD's stability is what we rely on. Anything else will just cost us money, money that could be in our pockets instead...
Linux could do it, more work though...
It's when someone yells out, "Check out this site", with an horrible flash intro, and all other users in the department go and load it up, that things get slow.
But, for most of the time, there's muscle to spare - hopefully enough for the next round of Microsoft Bloat version 2003...
If a department needs to grow for a short-term contract, etc, we can do it with existing infrastructure.
In the last infrastructure upgrade we did, all 60 machines were identical:
FreeBSD 4.7, autostart XFree86,
full-screen RDesktop to central Win2k Terminal Servers.
User's still think they have a windows box(windows splash screen on boot).
We use Firebird in Enterprise OLAP capacities for a few big clients.
0.5TB Single File Databases, High speed built-in stored procedure language, simple UDF (User Defined Function) interface for funky stuff written in C, Delphi, PERL, whatever.
We've never had a requirement for MS SSQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Empress, PICK, or Postgres.
Firebird just does it all, and blazingly quick at that
Firebird (was Borland Interbase) http://firebirdsql.org it's had all these abilities for years. I've had 76GB single-file databases on my FreeBSD machine since last year. Faster than Postgres on everything but deletes, but it cleans up after itself when postgres just marks pages for deletion during the next sweep. Same speed as MySQL on insert/update/delete. Slightly slower on selects, but that's understandable.
After all, it does have: Stored Procedures and Triggers using the same PL. Views, cursors, custom datatypes. Multi-terabyte file handling capacity Transactional Engine, with full Commit/Rollback. Full referential integrity
I've had it doing ~300 transactions/sec on my Celery450, so it rocks along nicely.
I've used Mysql, PostgreSQL, SQL Server. So far, Firebird outstrips them when you weigh all the features and performance.
Sure, you can power huge sites with MySQL, in the same way you can pull a 6-berth caravan with a Daewoo.
Firebird is a 4MB install. Why choose anything else?
BTW. It works a dream with PHP, Perl(DBI), C. Probably more, but they're the ones I've used personally.
We pulled a snapshot of FreeBSD 5.0 a year ago.
Here's a few tid bits:
uname -v
FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT #0; Mon Oct 30 20:41:51 EST 2000
root@servername_here:/var/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
Slashdot Mirror
Groovy.
Better go check the load average on the head samba box. The main pkg_dist box gets busy around this time of night - darned cron driven rsyncs prior to backup...
Good chatting with a non-newbie. It's a change around here;-)
Terribly sorry. The above 2.5 years refers to the samba boxes. They are still running FreeBSD 4.2...
I hate reading over things...I'll learn one day;)
Too right, they aren't as thin as they could be, but they're as thin as they need to be. /, /usr over NFS, read/write /tmp, /var either to server, or ram disks...it'd be fun.
Sure, you get great street cred to have everything netboot, but it was quicker to use the HDD the 60 boxes had in them.
A CDROM boot is nice, but you need 60 discs, and need to burn 60 every time you update workstations(yearly - bad point, I know...). We haven't had to administer these machines in 2.5 years. Not even a login.
The last update(XFree 4.3.0_8), was undetected by users, but it happened...
One day, yeah, netboot would be fun!
TFTP the kernel, mount read-only
But there's work to be done. bugger. no time for play...
It's such a shame you've had such a bitter personal experience with FreeBSD, and I honestly feel sorry for you. .xinitrc) /etc/rc.*, and /usr/local/etc/*, and read:
We timed the installation of the template workstation:
Bios config(boot from CD), bare iron FreeBSD install from CD, Networking to DHCP, XFree86 installed, configged to auto-start XFree86(su to non-root user, run X, rdesktop command in
Time taken: 28 minutes(ish)
We've only had good experiences with FreeBSD - that's why we use it for all non-Microsoft dependent services.
I'm not wanting to flame bait, but if you think it 'sucks an ass', spend a little time taking another look, learn the ports system, learn portupgrade, pkg_*, see the beauty in
man hier, man tuning, man firewall
I used Linux when the whole thing fitted on one 3.5" DD (720k) - about kernel 1.0.2(I think). Since then I've managed(and still do) systems running Caldera, RedHat, SuSe, Mandrake, and Scyld Beowulf Linux...They're nice, they work, but they're no FreeBSD.
Why Linux-based thin clients?
We already run FreeBSD-based thin clients (with W2K TS)
Each FBSD station automatically checks it's departmental samba box(doing NFS shares as well) for updates every night, and installs them automatically.
(We put the new packages on samba boxes once we've tested them...)
(Command to upgrade: ls -1 | xargs pkg_upgrade)
FreeBSD's stability is what we rely on. Anything else will just cost us money, money that could be in our pockets instead...
Linux could do it, more work though...
10(ish) users is fine during normal use.
It's when someone yells out, "Check out this site", with an horrible flash intro, and all other users in the department go and load it up, that things get slow.
But, for most of the time, there's muscle to spare - hopefully enough for the next round of Microsoft Bloat version 2003...
If a department needs to grow for a short-term contract, etc, we can do it with existing infrastructure.
Woops, sorry, forgot to log back in...
In the last infrastructure upgrade we did, all 60 machines were identical:
FreeBSD 4.7, autostart XFree86,
full-screen RDesktop to central Win2k Terminal Servers.
User's still think they have a windows
box(windows splash screen on boot).
Does this count?
We use Firebird in Enterprise OLAP capacities for a few big clients.
0.5TB Single File Databases, High speed built-in stored procedure language, simple UDF (User Defined Function) interface for funky stuff written in C, Delphi, PERL, whatever.
We've never had a requirement for MS SSQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Empress, PICK, or Postgres.
Firebird just does it all, and blazingly quick at that
Firebird (was Borland Interbase)
http://firebirdsql.org
it's had all these abilities for years.
I've had 76GB single-file databases on my FreeBSD machine since last year.
Faster than Postgres on everything but deletes, but it cleans up after itself when postgres just marks pages for deletion during the next sweep.
Same speed as MySQL on insert/update/delete.
Slightly slower on selects, but that's understandable.
After all, it does have:
Stored Procedures and Triggers using the same PL.
Views, cursors, custom datatypes.
Multi-terabyte file handling capacity
Transactional Engine, with full Commit/Rollback.
Full referential integrity
I've had it doing ~300 transactions/sec on my Celery450, so it rocks along nicely.
I've used Mysql, PostgreSQL, SQL Server.
So far, Firebird outstrips them when you weigh all the features and performance.
Sure, you can power huge sites with MySQL, in the same way you can pull a 6-berth caravan with a Daewoo.
Firebird is a 4MB install. Why choose anything else?
BTW. It works a dream with PHP, Perl(DBI), C.
Probably more, but they're the ones I've used personally.
FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT machine on our network:
12:10PM up 459 days, 50 mins, 2 users, load averages: 1.00, 1.02, 1.00
ho hum...
e-easy
Certainly was - SNAPSHOTS.
We wanted to see how it worked. As usual, it works well.
And Seti@home needed snapshot backups as well;-)...not
We pulled a snapshot of FreeBSD 5.0 a year ago.
Here's a few tid bits:
uname -v
FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT #0; Mon Oct 30 20:41:51 EST 2000
root@servername_here:/var/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
uptime
1:55PM up 367 days, 2:31, 1 user, load averages: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
Running flat out since it's only compile from cvs.