In a large setup, the reason for paying would be the proprietry management tools. Sure you may have a team capable of debugging and fixing kernels with their eyes shut, but what good are they if they're spending their time patching, recompiling, and performing manual operations on 100's of machines?
While I agree with this sentiment mostly, you have to realize that to the people that are paid to make these decisions (The Boss, the CIO, whatever) customizable == bad, at least as far as operating system decisions are concerned.
I agree totally.
When trying to convince the Powers That Be that FreeBSD is the way however, it is extremely easy when you point out most ISPs (especially the larger ones) run it in large scale systems without problem. Also a quick browse to the highest uptimes report on netcraft(?) is handy...
Seriously there are no jobs out here at the moment... a few tru64/solaris/aix/etc, but i've only got experience (albeit v.good experience) with linux/*bsd
Wow! Here in the UK you get £43/week apparently...
I say apparently, because I applied for JobSeeker's Allowance a few months ago and got turned down because I didn't pay enough National Insurance [~12% tax on your income] 4 years ago when I was a student!
Since then, I have paid well over £10,000 in NI yet they still won't give me £43/week.
It would certainly be possible, and wouldn't put too much load on a machine... but I can't see anyone going out of their way to modify squid or create a proxy from scratch just to do this
IMHO, most of the standard/. objectors are the sort of ppl I mentioned in #3 earlier... ppl I tend to have little regard for;)
Privacy is a nice little illusion shared by ppl who click on those pop-ups that look like windoze warnings telling them they should buy this-and-that crap software. In reality, you get about as much privacy as you would walking through a shopping centre with the obligatory cctv cameras everywhere.
My last job was a sysadmin for a major ISP who use transparent caches. Of course, there's already ACL lines in the configuration to limit use to the ISP's customers and load on those boxes is trivial. Adding a few more ACL lines to squid.conf really wouldn't be problematic.
To address your bold points: 1. The privacy of users is irellevant to businesses as long as they are within the limits set out by law. In fact, caches future-proof them against all these stupid "anti-terrorism" laws they keep trying to pass.
2. Squid could quite easily dish up a 403 Forbidden or similar page when a perv requests his kiddie fix. A simple grep through the logs could answer any police queries.
3. The last thing ISPs *ever* want is lusers taking control. It leads to lots of lusers thinking they know a lot more than they actually do, and wastes helpdesk time. (and of course the clueless in helpdesk would probably waste real tech's time with customer misconfigurations)
I used to run a server which distributed ~3TB/month. Initially I served these files via proftpd, but it soon became apparent that ftp daemons are far too bulky for high-volume serving.
Enter apache. On the same hardware which keeled under around 30-50 ftp sessions, I could handle over 400 concurrent http sessions, with plenty of ram left over for the vital cacheing:)
Indeed, and don't forget this thing has been firing itself out at wire speed, not relying on scans or states or anything else which could limit the rate of infection
I remember the reasonably slow wind-up on the code red/nimda detection graphs, but the wind-up period on this worm was virtually nil
Re:Upgrade path from 4.x-STABLE to 5.X-STABLE?
on
FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 Now Ready
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· Score: 2, Insightful
except you spend hours in mergemaster... much easier and quicker to take tarballs of configs/etc and reinstall. saves outdated files being left around too
X/Gnome/E on a dual athlon box seems noticably more responsive than under Linux.
However (and I'm not an expert on this stuff) dnetc runs around 5% slower under FreeBSD than Linux, which in turn is around 3% slower than under WinXP.
my last employer handled hundreds of thousands of email accounts through exim/ldap...
however i find exim is difficult to set up (unless perhaps it's one of those things you've already done) to work in a simple sendmail-style virtusertable/aliases way.
Rockstar Games got it right with the in-game radio adverts in Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City... they mention websites and phone numbers, which they actually own and run (the phone numbers apparently play recorded voice messages for the fake adverts in keeping with the game)
for instance: www.petsovernight.com "Delivering little bundles of love, in a box, directly to your door."
Get a Clue. Read what the thread is about and try to realise that just because you think linux is great doesn't mean everybody else should otherwise they're automatically wrong.
*My comparisons are based on"
on what? "Opening new tabs in mozilla is much faster then opening new windows in IE"? like for like? come off it. You have not given any quantitative comparison. In fact, you haven't given any comparison other than "mozilla rules, ie is shit". Go you...
"The fact that mozilla renders over 98% of the web sites I have ever been to is ample evidence of that."
There's that "I" again. Trust me, the world does NOT revolve around you.
FWIW, my FreeBSD desktop is a lot faster than the latest and "greatest" linux desktop, and I tried mozilla for windoze last month (on the dual athlon box), and found it even slower than running it under bsd/linux on the P3 laptop, most likely due to windows' inability to handle the rediculously large memory footprint of mozilla
Opening a new blank ie window ~0.5s (on a p3/1000 running XP) Opening a new blank mozilla window ~2s (on a dual XP1800 running FreeBSD/Gnome). Opening a few tab to the front ~1s.
If you read my post properly, you'll have noticed I never argued that mozilla's features were superior. Middle-clicking a link to open it in a backgrounded tab is heaven.
"better email and news"? how's that a comparason to IE? "tons of bookmarklets" you mean those bars and stuff that I disable straight off because they reduce the rendering area. As for skins, there are lots of downloads around that'll add lameass skins to IE. I'd just be happy to get mozilla to maintain my gtk theme.
Sites that fail to render correctly under mozilla aren't exclusively done my FrontPage dunces. If you look at the web stats for any web site designed for end-users you'll find that IE takes a majority of around 90%, mozilla around 2%. Most large companies couldn't give a shit about 2% when they're dealing with a user base of millions. The "smarter people" you describe who have their jobs still are the people who give management what management want, not what they want.
Better products don't usually win. It's the products with the best marketing and userbase. IE is and probably always will be installed on almost every desktop PC in the world, so that's what people will use.
As for your bashing of microsoft, please keep it in context and justify it. I dislike the ms philosophy as much as anybody, but they do have some good products - IE, MS Flight Sim, Wheelmice.
sorry, i use mozilla on a daily basis. I compile from source as well as use binaries, and it's just nowhere near as fast as IE, nor does IE take up such rediculous amounts of memory. Granted it's gotten a lot quicker in the past year or so, but it's still not there.
Speed of rendering isn't the only slowness. Starting mozilla, opening new windows, switching tabs, etc are hideously slow. Stick a computer-illiterate person in front of a machine, show them what to click on to bring up mozilla, and the response will be:
*click* hmm *click* hmm *click* it's broken
the point of the thread isn't discussing the technical merits of something, but its acceptance by the non-techy public. so even if it's the web designers making sites look shit in anything but IE, it's still going to make the public want to use IE - they have no concern that it's a badly desgned site, they just want to see "their internet"
If mozilla gained an automatic IE emulation system so it could render these sites, then yes it would be ready to be accepted by the public.
1. Surf (IE) Correct. IE is on every box, websites are designed for it, and it's FAST. IE with mozilla's tab handling and browser configurability (being able to disable pop-ups, pop-unders, etc) for example would be heaven, but no amount of features could ever make up for the fact mozilla is slow and often makes a right mess of some sites.
2. Email (OE) I'd disagree with you on this point. Email clients with no exceptions require configuration. If I were able to dictate its use, I'd have all my windoze-based users running Agent (www.forteinc.com). It's just as easy to use for a complete noob, and forces users into good netiquette. On this point, OSS can score just as highly as windoze.
3. IM (AIM/MSN) I wouldn't say AIM rules... ICQ has a massive userbase and has been around for ages. OSS IM clients are usually less troublesome than their windoze counterparts (compare icq to licq for example...). There are decent OSS clients for any IM platform
4. Office Productivity (Office) Fair enough, MS Office is indeed king. Abiword/gnumeric and the like are good substitutes, but only for people who have time or knowledge to get round broken documents ("strings arseyletter.doc > readable.txt")
5. Games Recently the games scene hasn't been too unkind to linux users. RTCW, Q3A, UT, UT3K, etc are undoubtedly the biggest games of the past few years, and have all got linux ports which alledgedly (i either run xp or *bsd, not linux) run within a few fps of their windoze counterparts. unlike the categories listed above, games are sold to a non-captive market - the developers will go with what the public want rather than what they want the public to have, so the more people who use linux games online will directly influence the popularity of linux ports. Given the recent popularity of linux, i can't imagine the trend of releasing linux clients will die for some time, however installing games under linux is definitely a lot more difficult than sticking the cd in and clicking install, next, next, next, ok, play. For this reason, it'll be quite some time - if at all - i imagine before linux gamers will reach anywhere near the number of windoze gamers
don't forget these things are about 30-40% the size of a 'normal' pc - the money they save by only requiring half the shelving space easily pays for it
What nobody's spotted so far is you have 294 boxes each with 80GB drives. That works out to a nice little side effect to the tune of around 20TBytes of networked storage. NICE!:)
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In a large setup, the reason for paying would be the proprietry management tools. Sure you may have a team capable of debugging and fixing kernels with their eyes shut, but what good are they if they're spending their time patching, recompiling, and performing manual operations on 100's of machines?
While I agree with this sentiment mostly, you have to realize that to the people that are paid to make these decisions (The Boss, the CIO, whatever) customizable == bad, at least as far as operating system decisions are concerned.
I agree totally.
When trying to convince the Powers That Be that FreeBSD is the way however, it is extremely easy when you point out most ISPs (especially the larger ones) run it in large scale systems without problem. Also a quick browse to the highest uptimes report on netcraft(?) is handy...
what server hardware is not supported by freebsd?
Thank god someone finally mentioned Elite! I remember playing for days on end on my Acorn Electron :)
UK.
Seriously there are no jobs out here at the moment... a few tru64/solaris/aix/etc, but i've only got experience (albeit v.good experience) with linux/*bsd
100/week stuffing letters in envelopes for me... Thank God I've managed to pick up a month's contracting job.
If you're a unix sysadmin, just take it as "a long, long time..." :/
> I've seen numbers as low as $380 quoted
Wow! Here in the UK you get £43/week apparently...
I say apparently, because I applied for JobSeeker's Allowance a few months ago and got turned down because I didn't pay enough National Insurance [~12% tax on your income] 4 years ago when I was a student!
Since then, I have paid well over £10,000 in NI yet they still won't give me £43/week.
It would certainly be possible, and wouldn't put too much load on a machine... but I can't see anyone going out of their way to modify squid or create a proxy from scratch just to do this
/. objectors are the sort of ppl I mentioned in #3 earlier... ppl I tend to have little regard for ;)
IMHO, most of the standard
Privacy is a nice little illusion shared by ppl who click on those pop-ups that look like windoze warnings telling them they should buy this-and-that crap software. In reality, you get about as much privacy as you would walking through a shopping centre with the obligatory cctv cameras everywhere.
My last job was a sysadmin for a major ISP who use transparent caches. Of course, there's already ACL lines in the configuration to limit use to the ISP's customers and load on those boxes is trivial. Adding a few more ACL lines to squid.conf really wouldn't be problematic.
To address your bold points:
1. The privacy of users is irellevant to businesses as long as they are within the limits set out by law. In fact, caches future-proof them against all these stupid "anti-terrorism" laws they keep trying to pass.
2. Squid could quite easily dish up a 403 Forbidden or similar page when a perv requests his kiddie fix. A simple grep through the logs could answer any police queries.
3. The last thing ISPs *ever* want is lusers taking control. It leads to lots of lusers thinking they know a lot more than they actually do, and wastes helpdesk time. (and of course the clueless in helpdesk would probably waste real tech's time with customer misconfigurations)
"In addition, the court ordered blocking may prevent access to legitimate sites that are hosted on the same server."
Transparent Squid proxies - block by hostname not by IP. If they decide to cache too, it can also help the ISP with their bandwidth bill.
Of course this would depend on the courts providing a nice plain list of kiddie pr0n URLs...
I used to run a server which distributed ~3TB/month. Initially I served these files via proftpd, but it soon became apparent that ftp daemons are far too bulky for high-volume serving.
:)
Enter apache. On the same hardware which keeled under around 30-50 ftp sessions, I could handle over 400 concurrent http sessions, with plenty of ram left over for the vital cacheing
Indeed, and don't forget this thing has been firing itself out at wire speed, not relying on scans or states or anything else which could limit the rate of infection
I remember the reasonably slow wind-up on the code red/nimda detection graphs, but the wind-up period on this worm was virtually nil
except you spend hours in mergemaster... much easier and quicker to take tarballs of configs/etc and reinstall. saves outdated files being left around too
X/Gnome/E on a dual athlon box seems noticably more responsive than under Linux.
However (and I'm not an expert on this stuff) dnetc runs around 5% slower under FreeBSD than Linux, which in turn is around 3% slower than under WinXP.
I'm on about 4.7-STABLE here...
my XF86Config for a ps2 microsoft wheelmouse:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "Protocol" "Auto"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Device" "/dev/psm0"
EndSection
no configuration needed elsewhere
my last employer handled hundreds of thousands of email accounts through exim/ldap...
however i find exim is difficult to set up (unless perhaps it's one of those things you've already done) to work in a simple sendmail-style virtusertable/aliases way.
We found Half-Life brilliant fun (P3/800 + onboard i810), a day or so of that so everyone's got the hang of it, then break out the TF mod :)
Rockstar Games got it right with the in-game radio adverts in Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City... they mention websites and phone numbers, which they actually own and run (the phone numbers apparently play recorded voice messages for the fake adverts in keeping with the game)
for instance: www.petsovernight.com "Delivering little bundles of love, in a box, directly to your door."
Get a Clue. Read what the thread is about and try to realise that just because you think linux is great doesn't mean everybody else should otherwise they're automatically wrong.
*My comparisons are based on"
on what? "Opening new tabs in mozilla is much faster then opening new windows in IE"? like for like? come off it. You have not given any quantitative comparison. In fact, you haven't given any comparison other than "mozilla rules, ie is shit". Go you...
"The fact that mozilla renders over 98% of the web sites I have ever been to is ample evidence of that."
There's that "I" again. Trust me, the world does NOT revolve around you.
FWIW, my FreeBSD desktop is a lot faster than the latest and "greatest" linux desktop, and I tried mozilla for windoze last month (on the dual athlon box), and found it even slower than running it under bsd/linux on the P3 laptop, most likely due to windows' inability to handle the rediculously large memory footprint of mozilla
Opening a new blank ie window ~0.5s (on a p3/1000 running XP)
Opening a new blank mozilla window ~2s (on a dual XP1800 running FreeBSD/Gnome). Opening a few tab to the front ~1s.
If you read my post properly, you'll have noticed I never argued that mozilla's features were superior. Middle-clicking a link to open it in a backgrounded tab is heaven.
"better email and news"? how's that a comparason to IE? "tons of bookmarklets" you mean those bars and stuff that I disable straight off because they reduce the rendering area. As for skins, there are lots of downloads around that'll add lameass skins to IE. I'd just be happy to get mozilla to maintain my gtk theme.
Sites that fail to render correctly under mozilla aren't exclusively done my FrontPage dunces. If you look at the web stats for any web site designed for end-users you'll find that IE takes a majority of around 90%, mozilla around 2%. Most large companies couldn't give a shit about 2% when they're dealing with a user base of millions. The "smarter people" you describe who have their jobs still are the people who give management what management want, not what they want.
Better products don't usually win. It's the products with the best marketing and userbase. IE is and probably always will be installed on almost every desktop PC in the world, so that's what people will use.
As for your bashing of microsoft, please keep it in context and justify it. I dislike the ms philosophy as much as anybody, but they do have some good products - IE, MS Flight Sim, Wheelmice.
sorry, i use mozilla on a daily basis. I compile from source as well as use binaries, and it's just nowhere near as fast as IE, nor does IE take up such rediculous amounts of memory. Granted it's gotten a lot quicker in the past year or so, but it's still not there.
Speed of rendering isn't the only slowness. Starting mozilla, opening new windows, switching tabs, etc are hideously slow. Stick a computer-illiterate person in front of a machine, show them what to click on to bring up mozilla, and the response will be:
*click*
hmm
*click*
hmm
*click*
it's broken
the point of the thread isn't discussing the technical merits of something, but its acceptance by the non-techy public. so even if it's the web designers making sites look shit in anything but IE, it's still going to make the public want to use IE - they have no concern that it's a badly desgned site, they just want to see "their internet"
If mozilla gained an automatic IE emulation system so it could render these sites, then yes it would be ready to be accepted by the public.
All IMHO:
1. Surf (IE)
Correct. IE is on every box, websites are designed for it, and it's FAST. IE with mozilla's tab handling and browser configurability (being able to disable pop-ups, pop-unders, etc) for example would be heaven, but no amount of features could ever make up for the fact mozilla is slow and often makes a right mess of some sites.
2. Email (OE)
I'd disagree with you on this point. Email clients with no exceptions require configuration. If I were able to dictate its use, I'd have all my windoze-based users running Agent (www.forteinc.com). It's just as easy to use for a complete noob, and forces users into good netiquette. On this point, OSS can score just as highly as windoze.
3. IM (AIM/MSN)
I wouldn't say AIM rules... ICQ has a massive userbase and has been around for ages. OSS IM clients are usually less troublesome than their windoze counterparts (compare icq to licq for example...). There are decent OSS clients for any IM platform
4. Office Productivity (Office)
Fair enough, MS Office is indeed king. Abiword/gnumeric and the like are good substitutes, but only for people who have time or knowledge to get round broken documents ("strings arseyletter.doc > readable.txt")
5. Games
Recently the games scene hasn't been too unkind to linux users. RTCW, Q3A, UT, UT3K, etc are undoubtedly the biggest games of the past few years, and have all got linux ports which alledgedly (i either run xp or *bsd, not linux) run within a few fps of their windoze counterparts. unlike the categories listed above, games are sold to a non-captive market - the developers will go with what the public want rather than what they want the public to have, so the more people who use linux games online will directly influence the popularity of linux ports. Given the recent popularity of linux, i can't imagine the trend of releasing linux clients will die for some time, however installing games under linux is definitely a lot more difficult than sticking the cd in and clicking install, next, next, next, ok, play. For this reason, it'll be quite some time - if at all - i imagine before linux gamers will reach anywhere near the number of windoze gamers
don't forget these things are about 30-40% the size of a 'normal' pc - the money they save by only requiring half the shelving space easily pays for it
What nobody's spotted so far is you have 294 boxes each with 80GB drives. That works out to a nice little side effect to the tune of around 20TBytes of networked storage. NICE! :)