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From: taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw (Brian Tao)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Whats best? Freebsd, Linux or Netbsd
Date: 17 Mar 1995 07:56:03 GMT
Organization: Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Academia Sinica
Lines: 57
Message-ID: <3kbfaj$naj@gate.sinica.edu.tw>
References: <3k6712$dcr@gate.sinica.edu.tw> <3k71k5$n8r@news0.cybernetics.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: @140.109.40.248
In article <3k71k5$n8r@news0.cybernetics.net>, James Robinson <james@hermes.cybernetics.net> wrote:
>
>Under what grounds do you feel that BSD/OS is superior under these
>circumstances? Please ground your opinion with a solid argument.
Gosh, I didn't know there would a quiz at the end of the day. ;-)
>Now, as I see it, with 100 dial in lines, the original poster is going
>to have to have a terminal server, hence a LAN. Therefore, an external
>ISDN router would fit well into this scenario, taking away BSD/OS's
>ISDN driver upper hand.
I wasn't even thinking about BSD/OS's ISDN driver, never having
used it myself.
>However, that sure is a lot of interactive users on one intel box. OTOH,
>check out wcarchive.cdrom.com -- it gets by pretty well. I dare say
>there is a best solution in this case.
Putting 100 interactive users on a single Intel box would be
folly, IMHO. I'd split it up into no more than 30 or so per machine
(a 486/66 with 64 megs and 3x that for swap can handle that quite
nicely). Walnut Creek's FTP site falls into the same class of every
other large FreeBSD site I've heard of: it doesn't need to deal with
hundreds of interactive users doing things that users are wont to do.
Someone else I've talked to briefly is serving up news on a FreeBSD
box with 192 megs of RAM with around 100 in.nnrpd's running.
I would say with some confidence that the same machine may not
gracefully handle, say, 40 users reading news and mail, using FTP,
telnetting out, running IRC, surfing the Web, compressing and
downloading message packets, compiling programs, editing files,
accessing a lot of files over NFS, etc. That machine might also have
to handle mail, run the the ircd and httpd daemons or whatever else
the admins want to force upon it. FreeBSD 2.0 *may* be able to handle
this AFAIK, but I *know* BSD/OS won't buckle under this load.
Another big question is one of support. I've had excellent
response to my pleas for help when my hardware didn't cooperate with
FreeBSD, no doubt. But if I have 1000 users who can't use some part
of the system because of a bug in the OS, I don't want to post a
question to comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc or to the freebsd-hackers and
demand an immediate fix. These people are volunteers and I do not
expect them to drop everything when *I* need something fixed. I *can*
expect this of BSDI, because I pay them good money for support. I
call up their voice line and they can have an engineer on my machine
working on the problem in short order. BSDI's tech support is really
quite commendable.
This is not to say that FreeBSD can't be an alternative. I'm
using FreeBSD 2.0 on production machines at work and (setting aside
the initial setup glitches) they haven't given me any major problems.
I would have uptimes of over a month if I didn't have this odd habit
of manually rebooting them once a week. ;-)
--
Brian ("Though this be madness, yet there is method in't") Tao
taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw <-- work ........ play --> taob@io.org